Being more engaged with Parliament.

One of the reasons I wanted to take on the VP external relations role was because I’ve always felt strongly that scientists shouldn’t be such wallflowers when a largely non science parliament makes policy decisions regarding science, technology and engineering….and don’t get me started about statistics…..

So I was quite excited to learn that the IPEM has representation at the Lords Parliamentary Science and Technology committee.  I wrote about this in blog No.4.  Last week Elspeth Bartlett (IPEM:Communications Officer) and I went along to a workshop organised by the Science Council and the Lords Science and Technology committee about engaging with parliament.

The workshop itself was the first one they had done and possibly a little mis-aimed at times but we did learn more about how the information makes its way into the Lords and then in to the Commons and finally hopefully into law. Click here to find out more.  http://www.parliament.uk/hlscience

The upshot of the afternoon was: If you feel really strongly about anything, you can write directly to the committee itself and petition them about a particular topic.

For example for those of you who follow Ben Goldacre’s blog or on twitter you will know that he feels very strongly about all the unpublished data that drug companies hold. He petitioned the committee and gave his evidence, along with others, last year

Ben Goldacre

http://www.badscience.net/2013/04/my-evidence-to-the-uk-parliamentary-select-committee-inquiry-into-missing-trial-data/

The published report can be downloaded here http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/science-technology/Clinical%20trials%20combined.pdf

Obviously, for the biggest impact we would want a topic to come from the IPEM HQ! May be we should ask the office to do a simple poll to ask members what they think IPEM should be petitioning this committee about. 

A number of firsts: My first trustee meeting, my first communications committee meeting and my first visit to the IPEM offices.

I can gladly report there is definitely a refreshingly cool breeze of change in the air. First hinted at in past President’s Dr Peter Jarrit’s scope editorial Vol 21 (1) March 2012 and now in mid transition as described by our dynamic CEO, Rosemary Cooke CBE in the last issue of SCOPE.

At the trustees meeting we discussed the overall strategy of the IPEM and money of course.  As current President Dr Steve Keevil discusses in the first issue of SCOPE this year, one of the biggest strategic changes taking place within IPEM is the devolving of decision making down to the committees and councils so that they don't have to wait for the trustees to decide on operational matters better decided by the committees themselves. We discussed at great length the results of the members’ survey. If you haven’t read over it already I recommend that you do (http://www.ipem.ac.uk/Members.aspx).  Some of the comments are both amusing and damming! Some good ones too.

At the end of the trustees meeting day I felt that I had learned more about how the IPEM works since I joined back in 1993 (gosh has it really been 20 years!!!). I had no idea the IPEM was doing so much.  I feel a little guilty that I had been dismissive of the organisation for so long.  Yes, it’s true, even though I had been a member of the MR-SIG since 2008 and now VP I had never really bothered to find out.  It’s a 2 way process of course. On the one hand we don't make it easy to find out stuff that’s going on. But it’s also up to us to at least point ourselves in the right direction to get the info. The website is drastically improving but it’s still difficult to navigate. The annual report is a good source of info but a bit dry to read. The newsletter is excellent but like a lot of newsletters I get from other organisations and journals it gets lost amongst the many emails I get.  For more info on Who’s Who click here http://www.ipem.ac.uk/Members/CommitteesGroups.aspx It's a lot of clicks and it doesn't look pretty but we’re all there.

The Communications Committee meeting or Comms Comm as it’s ‘affectionately’ called, took place a few days later in the IPEM offices in York. Again I’m embarrassed to say that I was kind of hoping that the idea floated (not very seriously) of moving the HQ to London would be accepted but having visited York, I take it back. It’s a charming place and actually from London takes less than 2hrs if you get the right train. Oh and they’ve managed to source CLUB biscuits (showing my age again :/) so they’re guaranteed to get me back.  It was a long day but very energising. It’s been a long time coming but I really think that this current configuration of the Comms Comm is going to bring the IPEM into the 21^st century. Marc Miquel is chair, he was brilliant as editor in the progression and guiding of SCOPE into the format we know and love now and he will be brilliant at Charing this committee too. Tenacity with a capital T. You can find the other members at the link above. I won’t steal their thunder but we’re hoping to launch a really exciting campaign this year to raise the profile of physics and engineering in healthcare, inspired in part by some of the answers we got from the member survey so do go and read it (http://www.ipem.ac.uk/Members.aspx.)  

Round table meeting with Lord AdonisOrganised at the Science Council offices, 9th jan 2014

Many professional bodies were invited: Institute of Food Science and Technology, Royal Society of Chemistry, Geological society, Cardiology Science and Technology, Society of Biology, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining,  Inst of physics, Inst of Environmental Sciences, Society for General Microbiology, Royal Astronomical Society, British Psychological Society, inst of Chemical Engineers, Association for Clinical Biochemistry, Chartered inst for IT and Inst of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology.

Preamble to the meeting:  Over the next few months, Lord Adonis will be touring the country to hear the views of local businesses, colleges and universities and professional bodies taking into account the diverse challenges to innovation and growth faced by the different regions. The report will also explore whether the insufficient provision of capital at the local level has constrained the growth of innovation clusters across the country, and whether a more localised approach to financing may be beneficial. He had already had 14 previous meetings around the country.

Lord Adonis asked us to think about the following three items before attending the meeting. He had asked similar things at each of the other meetings.

·       Gearing our education and training systems to make sure they meet the needs of employers and employees and help deliver a revolution to support the jobs of the future.

·       Providing SMEs (small to medium enterprise) with improved access to finance as well as support to grow more quickly and export.

·       Delivering polices in partnership with businesses and representative bodies at an appropriate national, regional or local level to drive this radical agenda for growth forward.

Lord Adonis began the meeting by explaining why he wanted to talk to us and what his thoughts were so far and drew our attention to the Lord Heseltine review – no stone unturned. Then asked us to focus on a couple of ideas one of which was that he would like to look at introducing apprenticeships. This he said was because he kept hearing the same thing that there was a lack of technically trained personnel.

The group highlighted a number of points in answer to this: No money for this type of on the job training · need to introduce incentives (monetary) for apprenticeships · put vocational training · and BTEC diplomas in the school league tables · the consequences of not doing this is that we have a small and overqualified scientific work force and need to go overseas to employ technicians · careers advice centres should be given a lot more information about technicians jobs that need only basic A’level or BTEC diplomas · the old chestnut of lack of science teachers.

The second point was could or should universities or professional bodies lead on the regional incentives* with working with small business?

General consensus was that it would be unreasonable to load this responsibility all on the universities, again the matter of incentives was discussed · It was felt that businesses often don’t know how to approach universities, and find the interaction all a bit high level and academic. We need better go betweens, is there a role here for the professional societies? · to aid in the communication between small businesses and universities, there should be a reinstatement of the RDAs.

*I couldn’t help but mention that we had a pretty good regional thing going on with our training scheme until the DoH decided to make it national and gave accreditation to only 3 universities in England.

But we kept coming back to education: Some sound bites were

“how do we make it ok to be a technician without a university degree”. 

“Schools want to send everyone to uni, parents want to send their kids to uni”, “everyone thinks scientists are bods who get phds and do weird science, so that if you enjoy science but don’t want to go to uni there’s no alternative”.
"missing skills are the biggest impediment to growth"
"the massive job of invention not just reinvention because employers don't take o apprenticeships at all"

Please feel free to comment below on any of the points above.

The Parliamentary and Scientific Committee Annual Lunch 2013 5th November

Fast cars and shmoozing over free food - is that what the VP does? If I'd known, said one of my colleagues, I would have applied.  Joking aside, shmoozing, or as its officially know "networking" is a very important part of this kind of job and as a rule those who did maths or a physics type subject at university aren't naturally good at that sort of thing. Its even harder of course when you need to network in room full of similar types!  I had hoped that lunch on the Parliamentary terrace would mean meeting the movers and shakers of the scientific business world. Instead however, there were the 80 somethings lords and ladies of this that and the other, the chief scientifc officer of course and a few MPs as well as people representing other learned societies but no business chiefs of small start ups or even people comfortable with social media networking.  I like meeting new people but even I had to work hard when I found myself sitting next to one of the VPs from the Mathematical Society.  However, over a plateful of very rare fillet steak and beautifully cooked green beans we bonded over the lack of post-graduate maths opportunities, although I had to change the subject when the conversation drifted to "if only mathematicians ruled the world!"  I was tempted to say wasn't it you guys who got us into the financial mess in the first place but decided that I'd rather enjoy my dessert of lemon syllabub.

Anyway enough about me I thought for this blog I'd leave you with some networking tips and links to some webpages I've found.   

Networking is:

•                Connecting with others

•                Helping and sharing knowledge and contacts with others

•                Deciding to find people genuinely interesting and fascinating

Networking is not:

•                Promoting or selling goods or services

•                Landing a job

•                Extracting a donation

•                Wrangling funding

•                Schmoozing or ingratiating oneself to gain an advantage

Networking is not about who you know - it’s about who knows you! 

http://www.aim.com.au/networking/10tips.html

http://www.top10networkingtips.com

My own one is "just relax" don't think of it as work, think of it as meeting new friends. 

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.

William Butler Yeats

More than just the NHS - expanding the membership

So I went to Mercedes Benz World on Sunday!!  Who knew this rather magical place existed just down the road in the unsuspecting suburb - Weybridge.  http://tinyurl.com/nf6223h

The reason I'm telling you about this is because apart from the absolutely gorgeous cars, there was rather a gem of an exhibition all about the safety features that are built into their cars. I'm a bit embarrased to say that until that moment the car industry was all fuel efficiency and speed to me but in fact there were exhibits from carefully designed air bags to fit around the entire interior of a car to infra red cameras for night time driving.   While I was wandering around, the IPEM mission statement came to mind - yes really ;) - "Our aim is to advance physics and engineering applied to medicine and biology for the public good" and I thought well you definitely have to have a deep understanding of human biology to design these specific safety features. May be we could persuade these engineers that joining the IPEM would be a good idea. However, while I would welcome a link into this quite different application of engineering and physics to human well-being I wasn't at all sure what it would be that the IPEM would be bringing into their world. 

Comments below please :)  - How do you think we should start swelling our membership now that we don't have compulsory trainee joiners?       

My take on the Gareth Roberts Science Policy Lecture 2013 - Professor Onora O'Neill

Gareth Roberts Science Policy Lecture 2013: 

8th October 6pm, The Law Society, Chancery Lane.

Professor Onora O'Neill

Why Science needs Ethics: why science cannot and should not aspire to be value free.

   

http://www.sciencecouncil.org/content/gareth-roberts-science-policy-lecture-2013

It was a pleasure to listen to Prof O’Neill. No slides just a well rehearsed reading of an essay.  I felt more as if I was in a lecture at Cambridge Uni than I did a public seminar -especially at the law society: dead posh - but that is no bad thing. Although the title was "Why science needs ethics" it was less about why science needs ethics but a description of what “norms” do we have in the scientific community and how or from what did they get formed. For more discussion on norms click here http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/418412/normative-ethics

A video of the talk will be posted on the science council website shortly.

I will try and summarise the talk below and highlight a couple of points that the IPEM community might want to consider.

Prof O’Neill reminded us that the adage “science is and should be ‘value free’” is now “old hat”. It is well recognised that the scientific community is governed by standards that could be described as ethical standards and that these standards have arisen from norms not empirical claims.

Norms are essential for an organised society and the scientific community is definitely an organised something; with units of measurement, language, methods, techniques, peer reviewed publication, 

including value norms such as honesty and integrity, and aesthetic norms: simplicity and elegance.

The professor went on to ask the question how then can science influence societal norms rather than societal norms influence the scientific community. She advocated for a more open transparent means for the public to access scientific data and that we had a responsibility – an ethical responsibility – to make sure that our work is intelligible to a lay audience and that we should not run from opposing views, purporting neutrality, but to confront what we consider to be unfounded facts. Think of homeopathy and climate change debates.

But lets face it, as scientists, we don’t particularly like to get into public spats in the media which is where they usually end up. It seems somehow undignified and yet public debates in almost every other field; think the today programme on Radio4 - arts and humanities, is common place and expected.

It was a thought provoking hour: I wanted to ask a question related to how should science react to the challenge of influencing societal norms when research such as that of David Nutt gets shut down by government because it doesn’t fit with current policy i.e. current societal norms. But it came out wrong and I ended up asking how we should react to government dictating what research should be carried out, which seemed to be asking the question about government only providing funding to what they are interested in e.g David Cameron and Dementia.  There wasn’t really an answer to that except that may be scientists should be not only cross-disciplinary in their approach to researching a problem but also cross-disciplinary in their approach to acquiring funding.

The discussion ended on a personally interesting note – almost as an aside to another question – be careful of allowing personally interested Lay people to polarise the debate.  I think this is of pertinent interest right now in the IPEM community. As scientists and engineers in healthcare we are being asked more and more to consider the patients point of view and seeing patients being represented on committees to discuss new healthcare technology (particularly in cancer treatment).  While I advocate whole heartedly that our first duty to healthcare is safety of the patients, carers and staff I think we can all think of instances where a mis-understanding of the science and technology can lead to unnecessary worry and/or in-appropriate decisions. So as a community do we need to step up and do more to educate the public in healthcare technology? And if so, how do we go about doing that with the resources we have?

Let me introduce myself......

Dear IPEM members,

My name is Anna Barnes and I am the new VP for External Relations at the IPEM. My plan is to blog after I've been to meetings so that you can get an idea what it is this VP is supposed to be doing and to allow you a space to comment on some of the issues that come up during meeting discussions. I really want this to become a place to exchange ideas. I also tweet during meetings as well @annibee70.

This first entry covers my attendance at the Dinner and Debate  RAISING THE BAR – CAN LEARNED SOCIETIES AND PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS DO MORE TO CONTRIBUTE TO ECONOMIC GROWTH? 24th September 2013, The royal Society

Courtesy of The foundation for Science and Technology

"a forum for promoting debate between parliament, government, industry and the research community" www.foundation.org

twitter feed #fstinstitutions

Speakers against: Prof. Tim Broyd (VP-ICE), Prof. James Watson (VP-IET), Patrick Kniveton (Pres – IME), posited they were doing enough

Speakers for: Prof John Uff, posited they weren't doing nearly enough.

My opinion

What a lot of silver haired gentlemen in dark suits was my first thought, but actually some of these silver haired gentlemen had some interesting things to say.  The speakers against gave nice summaries of what their institutions were doing, and why it was great to be an engineer, but none of them addressed the question and instead gave the impression that they felt that they were doing enough. However, I have picked out some interesting bits from each of their talks, even if it doesn’t explicitly relate to the debate.

You can download an official summary and slides from here http://www.foundation.org.uk/

Highlights

Tim Broyd, gave us a history lesson, then a list of all the ICE achievements and patted himself on the back, after taking credit for an increased number of engineering undergraduates and students taking physics at A'level: General consensus from the floor was that it was probably more down to Prof Brian Cox and Dara O'Briain! Interestingly, they have taken the responsibility to archive EVERY SINGLE blueprint/set of plans for major UK public works both in the UK and abroad.

James Watson (looks a bit like Alistair Darling), was more of a smooth customer, and delivered a sales pitch of why you should be an engineer and then join the IET.  Lots of buzz words “Actionable intelligence, job-ready training, the professional home for the engineer, knowledge mapping, inspiring, informing and influencing”, but when all was said and done he also patted himself on the back and felt they too were doing enough, even though he admitted that the gender gap was disgraceful. Oh and they have a TV channel!! IET.TV http://iet.tv. One statement caught my eye/ear: “to provide expert decision support to engineers when needed”. That is they provide a mechanism whereby engineers can get in touch with other engineers to gain expert advice. This "connectivity" is something the IPEM should aspire too.

Patrick Kniveton was the most humble of the 3 and admitted that 20 years ago they were an old boys club and had nothing new to offer anyone.  They had a rethink of their strategy and purpose and decided to engage more with their members.  They started by asking their members what they were interested in rather than what they had been doing, which was telling them what they should be interested in. He felt they could offer more training in soft skills and business but already had plans to put that in to practise. While he talked about famous engineers e.g Adrian Newey OBE, Sir Jonathon Ive ....he didn’t admit to whether any of them were members of any learned society though.

Prof John Uff, while a member of both ICE and IET and is now a barrister accused all of them of not addressing the question and then stated they were all irrelevant and that the best way they could contribute to the economy was to hurry up and finish the HS2, sell their prime real estate in SW1 and head for Birmingham!!!  But joking aside I think he did represent the feelings of the audience who felt that in general the professional organisations they were members of, don't do enough for the economy and don't do enough for their members.  In fact during dinner (which was very nice by the way) the existence of some organisations were questioned and we discussed the pros and cons of lots of different smaller professional bodies vs huge ones like the IET with 20,000 members. In fact someone suggested that we should embrace social networking and then if we have Linkedin do we need societies?  Questions also included supporting science education in schools by allowing science teachers to become members and redressing the gender balance, supporting British engineering start-ups, promoting cross-discipline collaborations. This last one is interesting and probably happens more in medicine than anywhere else. For example the society for neuroscience includes medics, psychologists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, geneticists........ not sure what the equivalent would be in nonmedical fields.  But of course if you think about it these all relate to building a workforce that can contribute to the economy.

In the end I don't think anyone changed their minds. The Professional organisations thought they were doing more than enough and the audience didn't think they were doing nearly enough. It seems that the IPEM are not the only ones who may be need to re-brand their old boys club image and question their relevance to their members as well as society .