Annual report 2020 published

We are this week delighted to publish our 2020 Annual Report – which details how the RCPsych adapted to the challenges of last year by rapidly migrating all its activities online and continuing to provide guidance and support to its members.

The report shows how:

• We delivered the biggest webinar programme of any UK medical royal college, with 79,081 member views for our 247 online events, including 20,319 views for our specialist clinical paid-for content.
• We rolled out one of the biggest digital exams run by any UK medical royal college, in response to the challenges of the pandemic, with 3,218 candidates successfully sitting our MRCPsych exam.
• Our comprehensive guidance for clinicians, written in conjunction with the NHS, on how to deliver mental health services in the midst of the pandemic was viewed on our website almost 500,000 times, with 21% of those views coming from overseas.
• Our Choose Psychiatry campaign helped further boost the popularity of psychiatry among foundation doctors, with 100% of psychiatric core training places in the UK being filled, for the first time on record.
• We helped to persuade the Government to firm up its promise of an additional £500m for mental health services, in England, in 2021/22, and a further £50m for 2020/21, for supporting patients to be discharged from hospital when appropriate.
  
• We secured our highest level of media coverage ever, with 13,207 media mentions (up by 34% on 2019) and an aggregate audience of 1.25bn (more than seven times higher than in 2019).
• We continued to run our quality improvement (QI) collaborative programme, which is one of the biggest QI initiatives in mental health globally; and migrated all our CCQI services to online platforms.
• We divested from fossil fuels and moved all of our investments to a green and ethical portfolio in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• We created our own bespoke diversity celebration called South Asian History Month, in July, to mark the contribution of South Asian psychiatrists – and were the first medical royal college to issue a statement in response to the tragic murder of George Floyd in the US, in May 2020.
• We won prizes, at the UK membership sector awards, for our Choose Psychiatry campaign and for leadership.

President Dr Adrian James and Chief Executive Paul Rees said:

“The Annual Report tells the story of how we faced the many challenges of 2020 and managed to thrive during an exceptionally difficult year.

“We would like to thank our inspirational members, our incredible staff team and our dedicated volunteers.

“In addition, we would like to pay tribute to the frontline psychiatrists, and the wider multi-disciplinary team, who continued to deliver excellent patient care through a year of crisis and challenge across the UK, and globally.”

Back to our May 2021 eNewsletter.