North East

At last, we are on the map as a Regional Group of the Institute. You may, like me, have been wondering for many years (since I did my MSc in Ergonomics at Loughborough in 1997) why this area has not had a Regional Group. Well, I decided that it was not effective or efficient of me to sit back and wait for someone else to step forward so when I bumped into John Winter at the Health & Wellbeing at Work exhibition in Birmingham this year, I decided to take the plunge and put my name forward.

A little about me: I am based in Northallerton and although my main day job is as Occupational Therapist in a Reablement team in Redcar, I still retain my self-employed status as an ergonomist one day a week to carry out workplace assessments. These vary from offices to manufacturing sites to facilitating injured workers to return to work with advice on graded programmes, adaptations and so on, for insurance companies and a local university and a variety of other sources. I have worked as an ergonomist for over 10 years now in a wide variety of settings and believe passionately in its approach. I love meeting fellow ergonomists and seeing just how diverse a discipline it is. So please send me some replies and let me know who you all are and let's arrange our first meeting as soon as possible!

As to our group, much of this will depend on who is interested in participating, where you are, how far you will travel and what we all want to do to support one another, learn from each other, network and socialise. I would like to get some feedback from you as to these points and we can then put together a programme of events and try out different ways of staying in touch and meeting up. Having looked at the information provided by other groups, I see that they suggest a variety of venues to suit the large areas covered, up to 6 events a year plus social meets. We can put together a LinkedIn page and you can Twitter if that suits you. For starters, how about I ask a few questions to clarify our aims and intentions and we can take it from there? If you could reply to me with these questions and I will put something together.

• Where are you based?
• Would you prefer to meet up during the day or evening or weekend? Please be as specific as possible as to the times and the days you would prefer.
• How far are you prepared to travel? If we are really organised we may even be able to arrange shared lifts and keep our carbon footprints and fuel bills down.
• What is your area of interest/ expertise/ job/ qualifications/ workplace? Is your workplace somewhere we could host an event?
• Do you have any thoughts on how often you would like to meet up, for how long and whether you want to just meet up informally first or have a pre-arranged event such as a guest speaker or a tour?

Looking forward to hearing from you and meeting you at one of our events!