u/BMA_Palazzo

Hi everyone!

I’m happy to update you all about the rescheduling of the Resident Doctor Conference 2026.

We have received approval for funding for a rescheduled Hybrid conference to take place on the 13th June 2026. It will be hosted at BMA House in London, and you can also attend virtually.

The First-time-attendee event will now take place on 2nd June 2026. This will be an evening event and will be online only. This is due to an inability to find dates where the venue, the contractors, the staff, the co-chairs, the agenda committee and the funding were all available. I’m sorry that we weren’t able to have this as an In-person event as had been planned. Attendees will be sent a new agenda for this event.

I appreciate that there is relatively short notice for the conference now, and that there may well be some of you who are no longer able to attend.

If you still wish to attend, and want to keep your seat at the conference, please follow the link in the email you will receive today, and confirm your place.

If your place is not confirmed by 9am on 1st June, then we will allocate your seat to someone on the waiting list.

We will also re-open registration for anyone who wants to join the waiting list to take any seats that have been given up by people who no longer wish to or are no longer able to attend.

Once you have confirmed your place, if you need help securing leave, we can send you a letter to show your employer, asking them to release you.

There are also Elections for seats to the annual representatives meeting (ARM) which are open to delegates from our conference. Due to the operational complications of the conference being so close to ARM, the election is open to anyone who initially held a seat to the original cancelled conference, and these delegates will also make up the electorate of this election (as is usual).

Please read through the agenda and send any amendments to motions, and riders and any emergency motions to info.rdc@bma.org.uk.

It’s taken a lot of work to reschedule the conference (it even included rescheduling a family holiday) and We want to say a big thank you to all the BMA staff and the RD Conference agenda committee for all that went into rescheduling it.

We look forward to seeing you all in June!

In solidarity,

Dr Francesco Palazzo & Dr Erin Gourley
Co-Chairs, BMA Resident Doctor Conference 2026

Dear Colleagues

It has been two weeks since we should have had our conference, and almost four weeks since we had to cancel it. We know that your conference is important to you, as it is a vital opportunity to steer the BMA to the direction you want it to follow, and a great opportunity to meet like-minded doctors who want to be more active in their union. 

We therefore wanted to update you on our plans for rescheduling the conference, on what we have been up to behind the scenes, and what you can still do to get involved. 

Rescheduled date

We have provisionally identified a new date for the conference. We have had conversations with many of you who have made it clear that your first choice of conference format would be both in person and online. Therefore we are submitting a funding request to the BMA’s Committee Scrutiny Panel to approve the funds for a rescheduled hybrid conference. As soon as this has been approved and the date is confirmed we will be in touch. Until then, have a think about if you’d still like to attend in person or if you’d like to switch to attending online, and if there are any motions you’d like to speak on.

Existing policy

As you may well know, your annual conference creates a lot of policy. Every year it is the responsibility of the Conference Agenda Committee to go through every piece of existing policy and check if it has been enacted, superseded, revoked or is no longer relevant. Some of this stretches back over 40 years! At the conference you’ll be asked to vote on a lapsing and retaining motion. Your agenda committee has identified policies that we believe can lapse and you will have the opportunity to vote on this at conference. 

Standing orders changes

The standing orders are the written rules about how conference is run. We have been working hard to make some changes to your conference standing orders to make things more streamlined, and to create a better, more impactful conference that works for everyone. 

Conference must vote to accept these changes so that they can come into effect for the future. 

The main changes are: 

Increasing the number of people who can attend the conference, adding an extra 100 spaces to the online platform.

Guaranteeing a place at the conference for anyone who submits a motion which is selected for debate on the agenda.

We are actively working on fixing the lapse and retain process to bring us in line with Consultants Conference. We want to make it more wide-ranging by automatically lapsing any policy that is more than 5 years old that hasn’t been acted on or re-visted, or actively selected to retain. Without this this our policy book will continue to grow, making it more difficult to implement newer more relevant policy. 

It makes no sense to have 15 year old policy which isn’t relevant to today. No doubt there are good policies we would want to keep hold of, but those that are over 5 years old would benefit from active engagement in them to keen them on the books. 

Agenda

You should have received your agenda with all of the motions to be debated (see email dated 1st April 2026). Please take the time to look through it and decide which motions  you wish to speak for or against. Your conference agenda committee had so many brilliant motions to read through to create this agenda, and we gave you all a say in the majority of them in a vote. Please submit any suggested amendments or riders to info.rdc@bma.org.uk

Emergency Motions

You can continue to submit emergency motions right up until the day before the conference. Please do send them in to info.rdc@bma.org.uk. Emergency motions must relate to new business, which has been identified since the close of the motion submission window.

First Time Attenders Day

This will unfortunately need to be moved to be an online event due to the unavailability of BMA House as a venue in which to hold the event. We will be in touch soon with more details about this. 

Thank you for your patience as we re-arrange your conference, we know it is as important to you as it is to us. We hope that the re-arranged conference will be able to go ahead smoothly, and that the BMA’s Board of Directors and newly-elected Council will be able to end the staff dispute to prevent any more disruption to the BMA. 

If you have any questions please do get in touch and we will do our best to answer them.

In Firmest Solidarity

Dr. Erin Gourley and Dr. Francesco Palazzo 

Co-Chairs, Resident Doctors Conference 2026