Few of us will have escaped the trials and tribulations of IT system installations, either at work or in our online interactions with service and goods providers outside of work.

We are mid-way through the installation of a new IT system which, despite the best efforts and a great deal of planning and preparation by our staff, has not been straight-forward.

We realise that your experience of using this system via our website, for example booking for events or renewing your membership, may have been less than ideal.

IT system issues have also contributed to members who had already paid their annual subscriptions receiving reminder emails and, in a few cases, members receiving test abstract submission confirmation emails by mistake.

We want our systems to be easy to use and helpful for you and accept that at present they are less than satisfactory.

For this we apologise unreservedly.

Our staff are working extremely hard with the company that is building our system to iron out these difficulties.

In the meantime, please bear with us and, if you are having a problem using our system (which would be via our website), please call the office on 0191 383 0839 and the staff will be happy to help you.

We are also keen to hear about your experience using the system – good and bad – so that we can feed this back to the company that we are working with. Please email Judith Mudd.

Thank you for your continued patience and support.

Judith Mudd, CEO and John Bone, Chair