RSTMH Mid-term Strategy review

Securing a new team, strong governance, effective systems and sustainable finances.

Over the last two years we have restructured our team to ensure we have the capacity to deliver our work, for example having dedicated roles for membership and meetings and events management. We have improved our governance by creating the International Members Committee and strengthening the Policy and Advocacy, and Education and Training Committees.  We also made some improvements to our Articles which included amending the President role to clarify the term and role of the President, including the year as President Elect and also of Past President. We created the roles of Country Ambassador, which is similar to the previous role of ‘Local Secretary’, and of Early Careers Trustee. We hope this provides greater oversight and input to these two important groups.

To make RSTMH more accessible and to better protect our data, we have updated our IT, phone and office systems. We recently launched our new website and database, to be more joined up and efficient, and to ensure finding information and taking action is as easy for members, Fellows and networks as possible.

In our financial review, we focused on becoming cost effective and sustainable. Prior to 2017 our income streams did not cover our operational costs without using our savings, this is the aim by the end of the five-year strategy in 2022. Over the last 2 years we have strengthened our current systems for generating income and have launched a new legacies programme for people to ensure future generations of researchers and professionals in our field are supported by RSTMH. We have also started looking into new ways to raise funds, including relaunching our donation function, which you may have seen in the newsletter.

Delivering impact for members, RSTMH and the global health community.

There are three ways we deliver our impact to bring change to policy, funding, and research:

1. Directly improving our members’ careers
2. Bringing together their collective knowledge to bring change in awareness, policy, funding or research
3. Utilising our own experience and outcomes to bring change in awareness, policy, funding or research

To enhance the careers of our members, we have expanded our Small Grants programme with the help of new funding partners, such as Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Wellcome Trust and International Trachoma Initiative (ITI) – now awarding 8 times as many grants as in 2017. We have introduced mentorship opportunities at our events and started to look into a more comprehensive mentorship programme. We now prioritise travel scholarships for early career members from LMICs, have reinvigorated the Student Essay Competition and introduced the role of Student Ambassadors.

To raise the profile of snakebite globally we worked with partners to launch the International Snakebite Awareness Day (ISBAD) on 18 September 2018, and are now part of a funders forum, encouraging research on snakebite as part of our small grants programme.. This year we are focusing on mycetoma and other skin NTDs, which we believe require greater profile. In 2020 we are also working with the World Health Organisation to raise the profile of NTDs through our new blog series, Ending NTDs: Together Towards 2030, and a special issue of our journal Transactions, due later in the year.

To translate our activities to impact, we are capturing the learnings and outcomes from our activities, and have started with events including those on NTDs, One Health and Planetary Health. We are now planning our Annual Meeting 2020, focusing on Emerging Diseases and Outbreaks and will do the same at that event.  These learning form the basis for our soon to be unveiled policy positions, the development of which are supported by the recruitment of Policy Advisors.