Introducing UK-Med’s new strategy (2021-26)

When we embarked on our 3-year strategy in July 2018, we set out to: 

Building on this effort, our new five-year strategy (2021–2026) will ensure that we continue to deliver the healthcare people need when crises or disasters hit.

Our members remain vital to this success. You play key roles as response team members, ambassadors for UK-Med, technical experts advising on our policies and procedures, fundraisers, and donors. All these roles make our responses possible.

We’d like to detail how we expect this strategy to impact on your experience as a member of UK-Med.

Opportunities to join a response

We know that working in our international responses is by far the most common reason for people becoming members of UK-Med, with 71% of members indicating this in last year’s Membership Satisfaction survey indicating this.

In every year covered by the strategy, Each year for the next five years, we aim to have 50 people participating in emergency response and 10 people participating in purely capacity building responses. This is a minimum yearly target that we expect to meet in quiet years and may significantly exceed in busy years.

We’re also working towards diversifying the types of response opportunities we offer, particularly as we look to develop long-term programming in a few locations around the world. These responses are likely to offer opportunities for longer deployments with a longer lead time, which might be suitable for those members who need to negotiate career breaks to respond for more than a few weeks.  

A growing Register

Over the last three years the Register has grown dramatically, more than doubling in size.  We have built on the hugely successful and valuable UK NHS clinicians register to bring in members from a global humanitarian workforce.

This diversity gives UK-Med an exceptional advantage in responding to humanitarian emergencies, as every one of you brings unique experience, skills and training that strengthen the Register.

A larger Register enables us to be more ambitious in the type and scale of responses that we can confidently propose to host countries and donors, which will increase the number of opportunities for you to respond.  We still have a little further to go growing the Register over the coming year, to ensure that we can meet any likely future requirements.

We have also worked to formalise our selection and training pathways, to ensure that every Register member is selected against the same high standards of technical skills and suitability to thrive in humanitarian contexts.

Continuing your learning and development

Providing learning opportunities for members has always been a key part of UK-Med’s work and our new strategy retains this as a central focus.   

We know from our survey that this matters to many of you, and that by investing in your development we strengthen our response teams. 

A focus on your experience and satisfaction 

For the first time, UK-Med is committing to measuring member satisfaction levels and setting targets in our strategy for improving this each year.

Your commitment is what allows us to commit to large-scale interventions that are ready to launch at immediate notice, and in return, we aim to give you the best possible experience as a member.  

New ways to engage 

We know that we can’t deploy all our members in responses as frequently as most people would want, but we are committed to developing other ways that you can be involved as a member.

One example is our focus on developing mechanisms for remote support.  This will provide new opportunities for members to provide support to healthcare services without the normal barriers to deployment and extend our impact into some of the hardest to reach humanitarian contexts or in circumstances where the need for additional expertise remains vital.

Our commitments to EDI, safeguarding and environmental stewardship 

In the strategy we reiterate and expand on some of our core commitments:

View the summary of the strategy here or the full version here.