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At one minute past midnight last night, an exciting and long-planned change occurred to our Association. As we slept or were working, the restructured British Association for Immediate Care formally and legally came into existence.

From 1st May, all members and our staff transferred to the new charitable company which is limited by guarantee. The previous charity and the two limited companies have now merged and all their assets transferred into the new Association. This whole process has ultimately taken three years to come to fruition. From the development of the Association’s future strategy, through to working with our solicitors and accountants, the production of the new Articles of Association and bylaws, and the final frantic signature collection, this project has taken many people to deliver it. I would like to take this opportunity to thank a few of the key people in this.

I would like to thank the trustees of the previous BASICS Executive Council for their support and guidance on this. This was truly a team effort and without their challenge and candid comments this transformation would not have been possible. I would also like to especially thank Andy Pountney and Rowley Cottingham, our Vice-Chair and Hon. Treasurer respectively, for their hard work and commitment to the senior team throughout this period. My biggest thanks have to go to Tony Kemp our Chief Officer and Past Chairman. Tony was Chairman when we started this, and he ended up doing all the chasing in the final hours as Chief Officer. The lockdown has made this especially difficult in collecting signatures and getting these witnessed for legal documentation, but he got us there with his attention to the detail and the need to ensure we did everything right.

We are in the final process of recruiting two new non-elected Directors to our Board. These two appointments will add a great deal of breadth and challenge to our strategic direction going forward and I welcome their want to be involved at this exciting time. We will introduce the Directors formally within the next month or so.

I am really energised by the future of our Association. Our membership numbers continue to increase, our social media presence is improving our reach and in addition, we are leading some innovation during this challenging period.

One of the big things for me, as I have said before, is supporting our schemes. We have already started to do this but going forward I would welcome discussions with all of you in schemes about what more we can do. There are some things we can do as a national association to support you locally but to do this we need to look at how we can improve centrally, how we listen to you and also how you engage with us so we can collect some key data which will greatly assist us in supporting you.

I hope you and your families and friends stay safe during this period and I look forward to speaking to you going forward.

Kind regards

Paul

Paul Gates OStJ MBA BSc(Hons) DipIMC RCSEd MCPara
Chairman | British Association for Immediate Care
@iampaulgates