RSTMH in 2025: looking at the year ahead

As we start this new year, it is a good time for us to reflect on the past few years as a society, what we have achieved and our goals for 2025, which is the second full year of our ambitious and exciting current strategy. 

Early Career Grants 

Over the last six years, with the support of donor partners, most notably the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), we have managed to grow the opportunity for early career researchers across LMICs to receive a grant to carry out their first piece of research ten-fold, creating almost 1,000 new awardees, as part of our Early Career Grants Programme. Almost half of the awardees are women, and we are extremely delighted to have contributed to gender equity at this early stage of research. The projects they have delivered have been diverse in so many ways and we know the innovators, leaders and innovations of the future will come from some of these projects.  

Having carried out our first workshop for awardees in West Africa last year, we are aware of the need to continue to develop this as a resource for awardees and to continue to scope the approach to an alumni network for them. We want to ensure that these talented and passionate individuals have the maximum opportunity to benefit from ongoing links to RSTMH, as well as to one another, and the collaborations this could bring.   

For the coming year, our Grants Programme will focus on delivering a successful number of awards in 2025, hopefully more than in 2024. We will also take stock of the Programme and how we can help past awardees maximise their career success.   

Journals 

It has also been a few years since we moved one of our journals, International Health, to be fully open access, meaning it is free to view, but not free to publish in. This move is a great benefit for anyone wanting to access scientific research, however we know that for some researchers and professionals based in LMICs, particularly in smaller institutions and non-academic organisations, open access fees can be prohibitive. This year we will continue to work with our publisher, Oxford University Press, to try and find ways to ensure that all our members and Fellows, friends and supporters, who wish to publish their research, are able to. 

To help make publishing more affordable, we recently decided to increase the discount we offer our members and Fellows to publish and we hope to announce this very shortly. In the last few years, we have been lucky to work with partners and friends to publish a number of supplements and special issues on key topics. This year we will kick off the year with a special issue on snakebite, due to be published for World NTD Day, which takes place later this month.  

Our journals programme this year aims to increase submissions in all areas of our work, and hopefully start some exciting supplements and other collections of work. This is alongside continuing to explore our role in highlighting the benefits and challenges of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Global Health for LMIC’s through our special collection and ongoing work.  

Members and Fellows 

In the last few years, we have improved resources and activities for our members and Fellows, to make membership with RSTMH more valuable to them, and more meaningful for their careers. Under our current strategy, everything we do must have a value for members and Fellows, and we have great plans to continue to develop new benefits during 2025.  

Over the next year, we hope to launch new and improved initiatives for our members and Fellows, including bringing back lifetime membership, as well as many more opportunities for networking and skills development, both in person and remotely.  

Late last year, we announced the call for members and Fellows to share information about interesting areas of work they are involved in, which we hope will mean a number of exciting webinars and other opportunities for members to grow their knowledge and hopefully identify new ways to work together. We look forward to making RSTMH membership even more valuable this year. 

Meetings and events 

Since 2021, we have delivered some important improvements in our meetings and events, including holding more online events which enable more of our international network to access our talks and discussions. This particular change started in 2021 when we experienced covid-19, and travel was so hard for us all. What became clear during that time was that some of our goals, such as sharing information and discussion, were more transferable to an online environment than others, such as networking and forming new collaborations.  

Since then, we have worked to improve the format and delivery of online events to try and meet some of these broader goals. Last year, we welcomed more people than ever before to to our online and in-person meetings. 

We are currently working on the events plan for the year, including our Annual Meeting which will be held on the 25-26 September in London, UK. We will be starting the year with a webinar at the end of January 2025 on World NTD day, to showcase a recent journal paper on climate change and NTDs with WHO.  

At the same time, over the next year, we will be selecting the Scientific Chair of the 22nd International Congress for Tropical Medicine and Malaria (ICTMM), the conference we are delivering on behalf of the International Federation for Tropical Medicine (IFTM) in 2028. You can now sign up for the ICTMM 2028 newsletter, where we will publish all developments leading up to the event, held in Liverpool, UK on 6-10 September 2028   

Strategy 

More broadly for us as a society, this year means a chance to continue to work towards the goals of our current strategy, for the years 2023-2028. The first goal is about improving skills, experiences and networks for our members and Fellows, which we hope to do across all of our current and new activities.  

The second is about delivering impact for communities and for the global health community at large. Alongside the impact of our work in providing grants to hundreds of early career researchers, this year we will continue to find ways to measure our impact. We will consider the outputs and outcomes of our day-to-day activities, as well as our partnerships, advocacy and policy work.  

We hope to strengthen our global partnerships, and work harder to convene discussions, as well as help form collaborations, particularly in cross cutting and strategic areas including climate change, conflict, and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).  

The final goal of our strategy is to ensure we have the capacity to deliver our work in a sustainable way. As a charity, we are going to focus more of our time on developing strong partnerships with donor partners and individuals to enable us to grow the areas of work where we are delivering the most success. Our capacity as a team is still small, at nine people, so we are very thankful to have hundreds of volunteers across the world who help add to that capacity and enable us to do more. This year we will work hard to ensure they are valued for their time and efforts and encourage others to join and support us.  

Sadly, we start the year with many countries and regions experiencing conflict and the effects of climate change, and we are again reminded that health is often affected, both directly and indirectly, and can receive setbacks easily. We continue to support our members and Fellows in conflict areas and will do what we can to help them maintain their links and networks. Despite the political, economic and social challenges, we are committed to doing all we can to harness new opportunities, including partnerships and technologies, for the benefit of the global health community.   

Governance 

This year. RSTMH is led by two leaders in global health, both women, and based in Ghana and the UK. Our Board has 16 members of which seven are based outside of the UK, from Africa and Asia. Our Country Ambassadors represent 29 countries and we hope will continue to remind us of how best we remain international in our approach, and consider the most neglected areas of health as we deliver our vision and goals.  

We are excited about our year ahead and hope we will be able to work with you during that adventure. Thank you so much for your support for RSTMH up to now, we hope it continues, and do let us know if there is more we can do to improve and make the impact of our work even stronger.