Committee and group news
Allergy Update
Junior members
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e are delighted to have taken over the Junior Members Representative role from October 2021. It’s been a busy period of settling into the role, and we both feel that having a joint approach, with a representative from both the Adult and the Paediatric trainees cohort, is highly beneficial. One of the biggest challenges we face is Cherry Alviani (pictured) the merging of the adult allergy and Paediatric Allergy Immunology Curricula, and how our Registrar, training days can adapt to this. The University Hospital training programme outline for 2022Southampton 2024 has been now finalized, whilst and Neha the next iteration of the training Christian programme will more fundamentally Adult Allergy reflect the change to the curriculum. Registrar, For the time being the training days Guy’s and St continue to remain virtual, which has Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust; really maximised attendance. Going forward, we’d love to see a return to Junior Members some face to face training meetings Representatives and perhaps we will be able to adopt
RECENT ACTIVITIES: • Online networking through Basecamp • Exciting programme of webinars and virtual events • New online learning modules under development a hybrid model. We are also looking into organizing evening teaching session with special focus on immunology which will help adult allergy trainees to better integrate into the new curriculum. The Medical Scholars programme has been extremely successful this year, with over 30 applicants and 21 scholarships awarded. The aim of this programme is to help promote an interest in a career in Allergy and Immunology, and it’s great to see such positive uptake. We have just launched a survey of the previous Scholars to determine whether they have progressed onto a career in Allergy and look forward to sharing these results for you in due course.
Nurses in Allergy Commitee W
Hannah Kramer Paediatric Allergy Nurse Specialist (London) and Chair of the Nurses in Allergy Committee
e offer a warm welcome to our new nurse committee members Shauna McKibben (Primary Care Representative), James Gardner (Vice Chair) and Sarah Burrell (Secretary). In March we were able to hold our first face to face committee meeting since the pandemic began. It was lovely to be back together again and to be able to meet new members in the flesh!
We said goodbye to our previous Chair, Lucy Common, back in November. We thank her for her hard work over her term. Lucy has led us through a challenging few years, but remained positive and passionate about nursing careers, enabling us to offer support to our colleagues across the country via virtual sessions during the pandemic. Our most recent meeting was a productive one, setting out our goals and objectives for the coming year. Our first objective is to establish an ‘Annual Allergy Update’ study day for BSACI
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nursing members. We are aiming for this to be a virtual day in October 2022, free for members and offering sessions suitable for both adult and paediatric nurses. Watch this space. We aim to begin advertising the programme and further details in the summer. Our second goal for this year is to update our ‘Allergy Nurse Competencies’ education document. We hope to expand the content to be more representative of the skills and knowledge we use in practice, incorporating intra-dermal testing and research sections. We will of course be reaching out to our nurse members first though via a short survey to welcome feedback on the current document so that we can be sure that all needs are met by the updated version. We organised an informal social meet for those of you who attended the WAO & BSACI conference in Edinburgh. This was a great opportunity to meet colleagues from across the British Isles. As always, we welcome any communication via our email address nurses@bsaci.org please do get in touch if there is anything we can support with. Or indeed you can follow us on Twitter @BSACInurses
