IPA Bulletin
President's Message

By Joel Sadavoy

Greetings colleagues. By the time you see this column IPA will have entered its 25th anniversary year, truly a remarkable accomplishment.
I will look back at the history of IPA and its role in the evolution of Psychogeriatrics throughout the world at a later date this year in an article for our journal, International Psychogeriatrics, but for this column I’d like to quickly review our accomplishments and look forward to the important developments on the near horizon.

As I have said before, it is my belief that a key capacity of any successful organization is the ability to anticipate change and move quickly and flexibly with the times. IPA’s learning portal technology is an example of the adaptive capacity of your organization. For example, some of you will have participated in the recent IPA Annual Members Business Meeting which for the first time was conducted electronically. While the method needs some refinement, it is an indication of the efforts IPA has been making to become more accessible to our membership through the use of technology. In this regard, we will be pursuing our use of technology ever more vigorously in the coming year with our next live simultaneous conference that will be broadcast from the Osaka Congress. The program has not been finalized yet but will likely follow the highly successful format of our first live broadcast held in March of 2006.

In keeping with our intent of capturing IPA’s remarkable array of educational presentations we will be digitally recording important meetings and posting them on the website for those of you who cannot get to the meetings. We will begin with the consensus conference held in Canterbury, UK last November. This was a very successful meeting that brought together key dementia experts from 14 countries and after two days of excellent presentations resulted in an IPA position paper on essential outcome measures important for dementia research. These presentations will be available with the associated slides streamed on the web. The consensus statement has been prepared and will be approved and published soon. Similarly, we will be capturing key presentations at the Istanbul regional meeting and at the Osaka Congress. As this unique array of information is posted to our website, I hope you will increasingly see IPA-Online as your preferred psychogeriatric web destination.

The corporate partners program, now a year old, is described on the website where you can learn about some of the details of this new important initiative. We had a successful launch to the program and it is in IPA’s interest to expand it. We believe that our infrastructure can support two to three such relationships over and above our current agenda. Expansion will involve analyzing the needs of potential corporate partners and evaluating where IPA can best collaborate. An example of the synergy that can occur through the corporate partner program is the data gathered in the recent series of European focus groups conducted in Paris by IPA as a result of discussions with our partner Myriad Pharmaceuticals. There, we explored the treatment patterns of patients with dementia in five European countries. The surprising diversity which we found in these patterns (details of which are presented in this issue of the Bulletin by Jacobo Mintzer on page 8) led to IPA’s intention to conduct a second wave of similar inquiries this time focusing on the Asia Pacific region. The information will help us more accurately focus IPA as we move more actively into the arena of public policy leadership and advocacy. Advocacy is a new initiative of IPA which was approved at the recent Board of Directors meeting in Canterbury. There we also approved a new committee led by Carlos Agusto de Mendonça Lima to take the project forward and you will hear more about this in the coming months. We anticipate that IPA’s move into a more active advocacy role will support our members and affiliated organizations in various regions to create more appropriate policies and systems of psychogeriatric care.

While a forward looking and developmental perspective is essential to IPA’s health, we also must temper our ambitions with clarity about our focus and priorities. To this end the leadership convened a strategic planning group which over the summer honed our agenda and produced a strategic planning document. This will be presented for ratification to the IPA Executive Committee followed by the Board of Directors in Istanbul and then will be posted on the web so our membership and others who are interested can see IPA’s road map for the next two years. Our next regional meeting is in Istanbul Turkey. If you go to the website you will find details about the speakers and program. What can’t be conveyed is the intangible feeling of excitement and even awe you will feel in Turkey as you encounter the art, history, and spirit of this, one of the cradles of western civilization. If you join us there you won’t be disappointed… I promise. As an added bonus you may wish to make a stop in Haifa, Israel prior to Istanbul, where IPA is convening a half-day satellite workshop on aging and ethnicity in collaboration with the Arab-Israel association and Haifa University on 29 April.

In keeping with IPA’s expanding educational agenda and the growing influence and importance of our journal, International Psychogeriatrics, you will now be able to enjoy six issues a year. David Ames, the Journal editor, believes this expansion will improve the timeliness of publication and also deal more effectively with the growing number of submissions.

Our 25th Anniversary celebrations will come to a climax at the Osaka Congress, 14-18 October 2007. If you have not yet made your travel plans, do so now. Time is getting short and you will all want to be included.



Reprinted from IPA Bulletin, Volume 24, Number 1