So how was the year for the BASW Renal Special Interest Group?

Last year we held a very successful study day after our AGM looking at the care of adolescents with renal failure and the transition of their care to adult services.

Our October meeting was held in York and was overshadowed by the very sudden death of our colleague Richard. We did manage however to do business and discussed;
• The Agenda for Change process and how it affected our members
• The NKRF Patient Fund and one of our members being involved in awarding grants – Chris Pritchard kindly took this on
• The offer from the National Kidney Federation asking me to become one of their Specialist Advisors
• The success of the patient NKF conference in Blackpool
• European Dialysis and transplant Nurses Association, with Simon Wall coming to the group to give some clarity about our group’s position and his position within this organisation.

In January the group met in London in a new venue this time, cleverly found by Cameron, at Guys Hospital. This was a very productive meeting where we dealt with the New Member Induction Pack, the creation of the Richard Dingwall award, the BASW sub committee for Adults and last but not least we rewrote our constitution. I would like to thank Heidi Steward for proposing a draft constitution for the group to work from. Writing the Constitution of the group as a group exercise was, I believe, quite an achievement and I think indicative of what a functioning group we are. But then I would think that as present chairperson! We also had the addition in January of a new group laptop, which was very exciting, especially for our secretary.

Outside our S/W meetings, members of the group were not only doing fantastic day to day social work with renal patients and their families but were presenting and chairing sessions at many meetings and conferences and undertaking research. No mean task!

That brings us back round to today’s meeting.

I would like to give a big thank you to Anne Murdoch, Jo Fearn and Cameron McGarva – who all do such a marvellous job as committee members.
Thanks to the study group team, Jenny Latchford, Ruth Crowther and Jane Atha, who have pulled together a really good looking study day for us tomorrow.
There are so many people in this group to thank for their contributions this year and I do hope I do not forget anyone;
• Chris Pritchard for taking on the Patient Trust Fund at what was the National Kidney Research Fund
• Julie Daniels for being our representative on the British Renal Society Council and
• Lisa Robertson for the Induction Pack and managing Elizabeth Ward Scholarship Fund.

This brings me on to another very big thank you and that is to Elizabeth Ward and the British Kidney Patient Association. Elizabeth’s support of this group and of Renal Social Work in general is invaluable. We cannot thank her enough for it and we do appreciate it. We were all so sad to hear of her loss this year when her husband died.

A year full of joys, camaraderie, frustrations, sadness, anger and loss, but then such is being alive. I would like to close my report with a poem, because it is poems that often keep me going through this life as a renal social worker.
Jenny and I indulge in them frequently and we have introduced ‘Poems on the Renal Unit’ in our York Haemodialysis Unit.

Sweetness

Just when it seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
Walking with a tumour, one more maniac

With a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it.
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that does not leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet…..

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s travelled
to come so far, to taste so good.

Stephen Dunn