A new direction to guide our ambition of saving lives and improving health

13 Sep 2017

As our friends and members, you are central to everything we do at the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. We are therefore thrilled to tell you about the start of our journey to a more impactful way of working and communicating. More than anything, we look forward to taking you all on this journey with us.

To coincide with our Annual Meeting, this year on the theme of Planetary Health, we are launching our new strategy 2017-2022. The strategy is the result of a review which involved RSTHM’s Board of Trustees, staff team, members, former members, and non-members. The six-month process included a comprehensive survey with approximately 200 respondents, and over 100 interviews.

Thank you to everyone who volunteered to share their views via the survey. We were really pleased that the respondents included members, lapsed members and non-members from a range of countries, sectors and at different career stages.

Your feedback

Among other things, you felt strongly that we should listen to our members more closely, increase partnerships with other organisations, maximise the diversity of our memberships and embrace different ways of communicating. All these opinions and more have been included in the development of this new strategy.

We have revisited how we describe ourselves, our ambitions, and how we work. This provides a new vision, mission and scope, which drive a new strategic approach and plans. We want to move forward with a fresh and exciting way of delivering our message that reaches more people and, importantly, has more impact.

As our world becomes more interconnected and interdependent, we must consider a wider approach to improving health through multiple disciplines and sectors.

At the heart of tropical medicine and global health community

We see ourselves and therefore you – as friends and members of RSTMH – as being at the heart of this strategy and the tropical medicine and global health community. Through our work, we want to empower you and other partners to achieve impact and equity in global health.

We asked you what issues you felt were most pressing in tropical medicine and global health, and, of these, which you felt we could make a difference in. The most frequently chosen included drug-resistant infections, neglected tropical diseases, malaria, emerging health threats, one health and Planetary Health – the theme of our Annual Meeting.

We are therefore keeping our ties and expertise in tropical medicine and infectious disease, yet expanding to include non-communicable diseases, as well as one health and Planetary Health considerations.

At our core, we are still the same. For more than 100 years, our reason for being has been to save lives and improve health around the world. This will not change and will always remain at our foundation.

Looking to the future

However, as we look to the future, our aim is to review and strengthen how we:

  • Facilitate research
  • Share knowledge across all disciplines
  • Guide lifelong careers and advancements

This will allow us to improve health around the world through more and better access to and greater equity in global healthcare.

This is our third communication to you about our new direction. We’ll keep you informed of our progress and will be asking for your feedback.

Check out the new RSTMH strategy 2017-2022 here