Reflecting on this year’s Annual Report and Accounts
6 October 2021
Maxine Supersaud discusses some of the key highlights of this year’s Annual Report and Accounts.
Hello, my name is Maxine and I joined GOsC in April this year as the Head of Resources and Assurance. My very first task in this new role was to tackle the financial audit and all that it entailed, whilst getting to grips with the organisational culture, stakeholder relationships and core principles of the GOsC.
No mean feat, but an exciting introduction to the intricate workings of the internal processes that drive the delivery of our core objectives.
Responding to the pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 hit us all like a tsunami; displacing lives and creating landslides with powerful economic disruptions.
GOsC, like most organisations, was not sheltered from this as the impact of the market volatility on our investments had resulted in a deficit in the previous financial year.
However, we were pleased with the recovery in the current financial year, which will provide some security to support our budget and our ambitious programme of work for 2021-22, which is outlined in the Annual Report and is already underway.
As well as the personal challenges we all faced and, as Matthew acknowledges in his Chief Executive and Registrar’s introduction to the Annual Report, the profession’s tremendous efforts to ensure that patients continued to be treated, GOsC had a duty to maintain business as usual.
The success of this can be attributed to Council and Committee members and the hardworking team at the GOsC for their commitment and flexibility. There was a need to adapt as we transitioned to new and often more efficient ways of working, whilst continuing to concentrate on our core functions of:
- assuring the quality of osteopathic education and training
- ensuring the continuing fitness to practise of registered qualified professionals
- promoting and setting high standards of osteopathic practice and conduct
- working in partnership with osteopaths to safeguard the protection of patients and the public
- maintaining the integrity of the statutory Register of osteopaths
Introducing the value proposition
GOsC remains strategically focused on initiatives that will deliver a clear patient or public benefit. To help to begin to describe where we believe we can, as a regulator, add value, in the Annual Report we have called this our ‘value proposition’, which has three components:
- Ensuring public protection
- Developing the profession
- Delivering robust governance
As you can see in the chart below, we were successful in maintaining a similar spread of expenditure across the three aspects of the value proposition to the previous financial year, with the principle expenditure being focused on our main aim of public protection. We did this through the efforts, strategic intervention and guidance of our GOsC team.
The principles underpinning the Value Proposition ensure:
- availability of appropriate funding
- resource allocation for the patient voice in informing work
- identification and funding of activities supporting upstream regulation
- streamlining activities
- cost efficiency and cost-effective resource deployment for continuous improvement
As we find ourselves hopefully starting to emerge from the pandemic, we are committed to learning positive lessons and adapting our future approach and ways of working, with Council continuing to monitor the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the GOsC.
Please do read more about our activities during this period in the Annual Report and Accounts which has now been laid before both Houses of Parliament and is published on our website.
