We’re influencing the way that healthcare is designed and delivered. Here are some highlights of our work in 2022.
We continued to promote, advocate and campaign on the issues that we know matter most to our members. We worked together with other royal colleges and medical societies to present a united voice on a range of topics, including leading a coalition of over 100 organisations on the #StrengthInNumbers campaign for independently verified assessments of the numbers of health and care staff needed to meet demand.
Our work in numbers
Our key achievements
Our policy priorities
Following consultation with our members, we refreshed our policy and campaigns priorities, resulting in four key areas of focus: the medical workforce, health inequality, clinical research, and sustainability and climate change. These will form the foundation of our influencing agenda for the next 4 years.
We were pleased to secure a manifesto commitment from Labour to double the number of medical school places. Following a year of campaigning, we also secured a commitment to a long-term workforce plan with independently verified forecasts of workforce numbers needed over the next 5, 10 and 15 years. We secured legislative changes in the Health and Care Act 2022 to facilitate research and ensure that the impact on health inequalities is part of the decision-making processes.
We led the Inequalities in Health Alliance (IHA) and the campaign for a cross-government strategy to reduce health inequality. Membership increased to over 230 organisations, and the campaign was highly commended in the 2022 Memcom Awards. We continued our proactive membership of health alliances and advisory groups. Our first video documentary, exploring obesity, has had over 110,000 views and 900 comments on YouTube.
We strengthened support for our members and fellows in Wales and Northern Ireland. In Wales, we established three cross-sector working groups. And in Northern Ireland, we published Stormont election calls, held a president’s roundtable and published a follow-up briefing.
Media and engagement
We continued to be a key voice for medicine and to showcase the RCP’s work in the media, on our website, social media channels and in member emails. We focused on development of a new RCP website (due to launch in 2023), evolving our streaming service RCP Player, and growing our social media following.
We achieved well over 6,000 appearances in the media in 2022. In digital engagement, we logged over 3 million page views on our website and gained nearly 14,000 new followers across our social media channels.
An impactful brand refresh improved the look and feel of materials across all our platforms, strengthening our digital brand and introducing greater consistency to aid recognition.
To support our internal communications, we sent weekly emails to staff with vital messages, news and information to support wellbeing, and created a new strategy for engagement. We also focused on the redevelopment of our intranet to a new user-friendly platform, which launched early in 2023.
Spreading best practice
We published over 30 policy positions, reports, consultation responses and guidance to support our members. Resources on the new NHS landscape focused on helping clinicians influence integrated care systems and work more closely with social care colleagues.
Our journals Clinical Medicine and Future Healthcare Journal continued to be a key platform for spreading best practice with over 6 million articles downloaded over the course of 2022. ClinMed’s impact factor more than doubled to 5.41. Another highlight was our member magazine Commentary winning ‘Best in-house membership magazine’ at the Memcom Awards 2022.
Our online and in-person conferences and events provided essential clinical updates, with RCP Player hosting over 20 webinars on a diverse range of topics.
We published new guidance to support clinicians in the key areas of pharmacogenomics, and prenatal and childhood genetic testing. New guidelines on the diagnosis of fibromyalgia syndrome are proving popular and the published materials have been downloaded over 10,000 times so far.
Promoting medicine and the RCP
We interpreted our historical resources to promote the history of medicine and the RCP through a varied programme of exhibitions, displays, tours and talks. We shared our heritage with over 1,200 attendees at events and tours, and nearly 90% rated them as ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’.
We launched a new targeted tour aimed at encouraging secondary school pupils into careers in medicine. We also held our first exhibition at The Spine in Liverpool in May. SELFLESS documented the lives of health and care staff during the COVID-19 pandemic in a collection of stark and compelling photographs by photographer Jessica van der Weert.