In May we invited all members of our Community of Practice to respond to our member survey. 479 of our members responded (around 1 in 5) including more than half of the UK EMT register. Thank you for taking the time to respond; your feedback has given us really valuable insights into what you want from UK-Med membership and the expertise you have to offer in humanitarian responses. Here are some key insights:
UK-Med members have a wealth of clinical expertise.
We already knew that UK-Med members include around 700 doctors or surgeons, 500 nurses and 700 other health professionals and now we have a much clearer idea of the membership’s spread of experience.
- 87% of doctors and surgeons responding have at least 8 years’ of professional experience under their belt, and 92% of nurses responding have at least 5 years’ of professional experience.
- 90% of other health professionals who responded have at least 5 years’ of professional experience.
- Across the board there is plenty of experience of leadership and management, with 94% of respondents reporting that they had some experience of supervising health professionals’ day-to-day work, and 75% had been doing this for at least 2 years.
- 43% or respondents reported having at least 2 years’ experience of department management in health settings.
A significant proportion of UK-Med members are experienced in humanitarian/development contexts.
UK-Med has a tradition of recruiting UK-based (particularly NHS) clinicians and preparing them for their first humanitarian responses, however that is by no means the full story for all UK-Med members.
- Although just under a third of respondents reported no previous overseas work in humanitarian / development health roles, more than 300 respondents reported having this experience.
- By far the largest group here had undertaken clinical work in an outbreak response, with over 150 people having this experience.
- 23% of members responding reported more than one full year working in humanitarian / development health programmes.
UK-Med members are interested and available in a variety of other programming models in addition to the UK EMT.
We asked all respondents to indicate which types of programming and roles they would be both interested in and available for. You told us that you have an appetite for a wide range of programming models beyond the existing UK EMT structure.
- The UK EMT on-call model was the most popular suggested with 76% of respondents choosing this option – unsurprisingly given that the majority of responses came from people already involved with this programme.
- There was also significant interest in longer deployments: 38% of respondents said they were willing and available for clinical work in surge responses lasting 3-12 months at 1 weeks’ notice.
- This rose to 55% for three month clinical roles with at least 1 months’ notice
This should provide a strong base from which to build longer-term UK-Med responses and to develop partnerships with other NGOs who already work on similar models. Thank you to all our members for their continued support and commitment.
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