Menstruation - Menopause: Introducing a new British Standard

Anne Hayes heads up the BSI Knowledge teams that lead the Sector strategies and the standards to ensure UK and global innovation and policy are supported with relevant standards. Having spent 20 years working within the standardization world she has experience across a broad range of industries and sectors having headed up teams for Governance, Risk and resilience as well as healthcare and sustainability.

Previously to BSI Anne was Editorial Director at Sweet & Maxwell Ltd.

Darron Dupre is Head of Local Government at UNISON Cymru Wales. As the senior negotiator for around 35,000 UNISON council workers in Wales, 75% of whom are women, Darron places equality as well as terms and conditions at the heart of his work.

Darron became a union rep for the National Union of Public Employees in 1991 whilst working in the NHS. In 1993, NUPE became UNISON and in 1994, Darron became UNISON's youngest Branch Secretary at the age of 23. In 2000, Darron joined the Wales Trade Union Congress (Wales TUC) as Research Officer and in 2006 returned to UNISON as a Regional Organiser.

In 2017, Darron attended the Wales TUC launch of their Menopause Toolkit, an event that he says, 'was the most profound of my career'. Armed with his Toolkit, Darron asked Velindre University NHS Trust whether it would work in partnership with UNISON around a menopause awareness and support campaign for all staff. This project created the very first employer Menopause Cafe in Wales, won a number of HR Awards for the Trust and was used as the best practice example for NHS Wales. Darron also negotiated for NHS Wales to send bi-lingual menopause awareness posters to every GP surgery in Wales.

Noting that the Local Government workforce in Wales is statistically older and female, Darron is currently working with the Welsh Local Government Association to place menopause awareness and support at the top of the workforce agenda . To support this, Darron will be conducting a survey of the entire UNISON council and schools' membership, women and men, to better understand the menopause experiences of local government workers in Wales.