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A good news story – the BIOS Vice Chair – Julie Dowdney has just completed a trek of the Great Wall of China, including the dangerously steep Stairway to Heaven for the Bournemouth Hospitals Charity raising funds for the orthoptic department.  Months of training and conditioning helped Julie walk the 78 miles in 6 days, climb 980 floors and see sunrise and sunset on one day when the trek involved 10 hours of walking. Julie has shared some of her photos and would be very happy to talk to any members who are considering doing something similar for charity.  We would love to hear your good news stories to share with members so please do send them in.

Thank you to all heads of service or vision screening leads who completed the FOI request sent to English departments to establish the provision and variability of 4-5 year old vision screening. Jigs Mehta, Public Health Lead for BIOS, and I presented the initial findings to the Clinical Council for Eye Health Commissioning earlier in the month and an official press release will be sent out shortly.  We will inform you of the results via PV or email briefing before the press release is made public. This has been a phenomenal piece of work as you will see by the results and I would like to thank, Rich Huzzey (policy officer), Jigs Mehta, Karon McCarthy and Alison Bruce (VS CAG Leads) for all their hard work.

As you will know we had to convert clinical tutor refresher day to a full clinical tutor 2 days course so there are 2 running in November with a small number of places left on the second course. This means we will have over 35 new clinical tutors trained which will go to supporting the offers of high quality placements and increasing capacity as our numbers of undergraduate first years increased this year.

If you have a 2019 new graduate in your department please make sure that they have updated their details on the BIOS website as they have free full membership until the renewal date 1st January 2020 and are then entitled to a reduced fee for their first full year.  Please ask them to contact Joe Smith on newgrad@orthoptics.org,uk to join the new grad network to ensure that their voice is heard at Council. We are in the process of setting a new grad group up in the member area.

I am always very happy to hear your views and comments so please contact me directly  chair@orthoptics.org.uk or via the admin account bios@orthoptics.org.uk