As retired members, we bring decades' worth of experience, and an eagerness to stay connected to our profession, our colleagues, and the issues we care about.

It was a pleasure, then, to join members from across the UK at RCN HQ for the Retired Members Conference this month. Many members present had served on Branch Committees and use the knowledge they gained to help Branch Officers meet the challenges of the new role they are taking on.

This wasn’t a talking-shop conference either. The goal of the day was practical: setting up local groups for retired members that can take action, with members from regions sharing a table and encouraging each other on how we could move things forward.

After brainstorming sessions on people we could reach out to in our networks, and what the issues we face collectively are, we thought about the types of action we could take together to tackle them. Thinking and talking about these topics really brought home for me the depth of insights and knowledge in our retired members – a career in nursing will certainly leave you wiser! As many of us are reaching our early 70s we know retired members face unique and heightened challenges: from social isolation, to choosing between heating and eating, to accessibility and care.

By the end of the day, we had a WhatsApp chat set up for retired members in our region, a provisional date for an inaugural meeting, and had identified 20 people we would aim to get to attend.

Other unions have shown there’s power in retired member activism to have an impact; just look at how retired union members led the sucessful campaign against winter fuel payment cuts.

Now, we have the chance to do the same, and the Retired Members’ Conference was the start. We also learnt that the issue of retired members being officially recognised as an RCN network is being discussed by Council, so there's plenty of potential we can build upon.