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Good morning, everyone. I hope you're enjoying the conference today. My name is Michael. I am um the Quality and Diversity Officer and I am a trainee registrar at Southeast London. I'm honored today to be chairing this session about building surgery for tomorrow. I have on stage, MS Alona Courtney, my colleague and um our first speaker is Mr Tim Mitchell. Mr Mitchell is going to speak about an update of diversity and surgery. He's an ent consultant. He is an ENT UK trustee and around remember of Medical Women's Federation. He's also the current Vice Presidente of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the Presidente elect. Please welcome Mr Mitchell. Thank you very much and thank you for that very kind introduction. It's great pleasure to be here in Liverpool, uh and a great conference so far. What an amazing start this morning and an in credible story from mobile, uh really inspiring. Um So congratulations, everybody asked for putting on a fantastic conference, really looking forward to the rest of today and tomorrow, having an opportunity to meet people and hear your thoughts. Uh Congratulations to Martin on a fantastic year as Presidente and many congratulations to Shannon taking over as president of asset and very much look forward to working with him, uh, and the rest of asset over the coming year. I'm very grateful to the President's this morning for essentially covering everything I intended to cover in my talk. Um, but you've heard reference already to the Kennedy Report, uh, which was published in March 2021. I'm sure that many of you will be familiar with that. Uh If you haven't read it, uh or indeed, if you have read it, I would recommend that you should reread it. Uh You can access that from the Royal College of Surgeons of England website and it's certainly merits rereading. Uh So here we are two years on from its publication, there's been a huge amount of work going on during that period of time. Uh A lot of work by the staff in our college, by council members and other members of the college. And as we were invited to buy the report, we have been publishing uh regularly regular six monthly updates which are available through our website and will be another one of those coming later this month. And can I say that this is really, really important work, the presence of alluded to that this morning? Uh It's important work because it's the right thing to do uh to ensure that we have diversity, equity and inclusion across our profession. And it's incredibly important for the future of our profession. As part of the report, we were invited to uh have a flagship project looking at parents in surgery. And we've had some discussion around that this morning, a recognition that juggling perhaps to careers and a family is incredibly difficult. We've heard uh issues about potentially having to move from one location to another. Uh and all that flows from that. Uh And very often the time that people are thinking about trying to have a family uh comes along just at a really difficult career time which involves moving examinations and so on. Uh And a recognition therefore that that's uh something we really have to support people at that time. So after a lot of preparatory work, we published a report back in September last year and just this week, uh there's been a further report published by the Nuffield Trust who we've been working with uh which has really put some flesh to the bones uh of the issues that we thought were relevant in the report that we published. Uh I'm not going to go through in detail, but I would invite you if this is something you wish to learn more about to come to the breakout session uh tomorrow uh session that I should be chairing 10 past 12 in hall one C when we'll have an opportunity to explore some of these issues uh in rather more detail. But certainly a recognition, this is an important piece of work that we have to get right. Um, as part of that, we're engaging with our women in surgery network. Uh And as many of you will be familiar, we have an emerging leaders program. Women in surgery has over 6000 members. I'm delighted. The chair of Women in Surgery. Tamsin coming is here, uh, this weekend. Uh, and there are a number of sessions going on related to women in surgery. I would invite you again to come to the coffee and cupcake morning. Uh which terms and will be at tomorrow morning, 10 30 in room three A. Uh Please don't tell our dental faculty about the cupcakes. They'll be rather upset. I suspect um other breakout sessions as well. And there's been some important work as many of you'll be aware on the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. And Greta mclachlan is going to speak to that uh later in this session. Uh Next week on Wednesday is International Women's Day. We have an event which is available for you to join either in person uh at our college in London or you can join online. We have professor Really Yang from the Gold Coast in Australia who will be speaking at that and was involved with the respect initiative, the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, aside from parents in surgery, we have developed a grassroots program uh to try to support those groups that are encouraging people into surgery from a range of diverse backgrounds uh we were able to award grants to a total of nearly 50,000 lbs last year. And I've put here some of the uh of the groups that were successful in bidding for those awards. Uh We had 28 applications which we had to narrow down to the winning successful ones. Uh But we are very keen not to exclude people as part of that process. So following up from that, we've recently had an event where we invited those people who are unsuccessful to come to a meeting to talk about their projects to network together in order to try to support uh those groups. One of the other lines of work which came out of the Kennedy report was the need to support uh S A S surgeons and local employed doctors. Uh We very much recognize that this has been part of the workforce that first of all has been critical to the care that the NHS delivers. Uh And I think it's fair to say, rather overlooked uh perhaps unsupportive part of the workforce over the years. Uh And so we have developed or in the process of developing R S A S strategy to help to support that. Uh You've heard the president's talk about that. Also this morning, there is an intercollegiate project to provide education for S A S uh surgeons. Uh an important to show that support. We know that this is an expanding part of the workforce. Uh There were more international medical graduates entered into the medical register last year than UK graduates. Uh And we as colleges certainly recognize that this is a group that doesn't necessarily have the same sort of contact uh with college is that those coming through a more traditional training program might have because the traditional route into membership has been through the examination process. Uh and not all of these international medical graduates and S A S surgeons are necessarily following that path. It's very clear that the direction of travel will be to have alternative methods of getting on to the specialist register. And therefore, it's very important that we recognize that uh and support uh that group. And I know that the next speaker is going to talk about S A S surgeons for Northern Ireland perspective and very into to see uh news of that um the Kennedy report had 16 recommendations we recognized in consultation with our members that there were other areas that weren't really represented uh in the report. And so we set up two additional programs and delighted to say we have an L G B T Q plus program in collaboration with the Pride In Surgery Forum. We will be holding the second out at the college event uh which will not be at the college in London, but based in our Manchester hub on Friday the 16th of June. Uh Please do look at our website for further information details if you are interested. Uh And then, in addition to that, we've also got a program that's starting up now around race, ethnicity, faith and belief uh as that wasn't really represented in detail in the Candida report. So there's two additional programs uh we have added on uh and are progressing. So in addition to transforming the way the college presents itself to its members and trying to influence the culture in the health service, working with others. Uh As many of you will know, we've also transfer transformed our facilities in Lincoln's Infield in London, have a new building uh which looks very similar from the outside, but behind that facade has completely changed. Uh And I hope if you haven't been to many of you will come and visit us there uh in the near future, this is a summary of our strategy. And what you will see is that one of the strategic aims, one of the five strategic aims is embracing diversity and indeed diversity appears in the fifth strategic came as well. Um And our values are there around collaboration, respect and excellence. Uh So, as I suggested already, we absolutely recognize the need to embed these issues at the center of our organization. Uh and indeed at the center of our profession. So I think it's fair to say that we're all on a journey perhaps at the start of the journey, but we're making progress. Uh I can't guarantee the skies will be blue and clear throughout. But by working together, we will make progress and I would invite all of you to come and join with us in that, in that work. If you'd like more information or you want to get involved, then please do contact us. We have a specific email address diversity at R C S E N G dot A C dot U K. We'd be delighted to hear from you to engage with you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr Mitchell.