IPA Bulletin
President's Message

by Helen Fung-Kum Chiu

New Election Changes

Having recently returned from the 2008 IPA International Meeting in Dublin, Ireland, I must again express my appreciation to our IPA meeting chairs, Gregory Swanwick and Brian Lawlor, along with Anand Ramakrishnan from the Faculty of Old Age Psychiatry of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and the organizing and scientific committees for their leadership and efforts which made this meeting a great success. With almost 600 delegates and a high quality scientific program, it was outstanding and one of IPA’s largest regional/international meetings.

While Ajit Shah will provide more specific meeting highlights on page 6 in this issue, I want to mention some important aspects of the program. On the day before the meeting, we held two workshops, one on psychotherapy and the other on neuroimaging. This was the first time that we conducted the Psychotherapy workshop, an important but relatively neglected topic. I would like to thank Pirjo Juhela and Joel Sadavoy for organizing this excellent workshop (see the summary on page 8). Our plan is to conduct another one at the Montréal Congress in 2009. Following the successful first workshop in December 2007, we held the Neuroimaging in Dementia workshop again in Dublin. It proved to be highly popular … again with sold-out attendance. Due to this high level of interest, we are planning to conduct it once more in September in Italy. I would like to thank John O’Brien and Philip Scheltens for organizing this superb educational program. To learn more about the workshop, see the article on page 9… and if you are interested, don’t wait to register, this workshop is limited to 50 participants and will probably sell out again. In addition, we held our third Forum on Residential Care during the Dublin meeting. This was organized by our IPA Task Force on Residential Care Facilities, and we plan to have more programs on this topic at the Montréal Congress. There was a lot of interest and enthusiasm from delegates in the Forum, and I would like to thank John Snowdon and David Conn for taking the lead in this very active and productive task force.

I am delighted to report we had a very fruitful meeting with Dr. David Anderson, Chair of the Faculty of Old Age Psychiatry of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Dr. Anand Ramakrishnan, Academic Secretary of the Faculty of Old Age Psychiatry. We agreed that we should build closer links between the two organizations. IPA also extended an invitation to the Faculty of Old Age Psychiatry to become our affiliate organization. These kinds of international meetings enable IPA to build a stronger collaborative network of organizations dedicated toward improving care.

As you can see, IPA continues to evolve and work toward getting more professionals involved with IPA. As reported in our last Bulletin issue, the IPA Board has been discussing how to become even more of a multidisciplinary organization and engage a greater number of our colleagues from the non-physician areas of practice: nurses, psychologists, social workers, occupational therapists, and others. To this end, at our recent Board of Directors meeting in Dublin, we changed the IPA bylaws regarding the election of Board positions to the following: The Board of Directors shall be composed of two types of elected positions: open seats and designated seats. For the open seats, no more than two directors shall be residents of the same country, provided, however that if an incumbent director shall take up residence in a country in which two or more incumbent directors currently reside, all such directors shall be entitled to serve the remainder of their respective terms as directors. The designated seats will be available solely for directors with a non-medical background. A maximum of four seats may be designated solely for non-medical professionals on the Board. No more than two directors in the designated seats may be from the same country.

The Board also set aside some funding support to assist Board members of the designated seats to travel to our Board meetings. The Board intends to review this change in two years. More information is provided on the IPA website. I hope these changes encourage and enable all of our members to actively contribute in leadership roles to IPA.

There are many other exciting developments and projects in IPA and I look forward to sharing these with you in my future reports. In the meantime, I invite you to contact me with your suggestions, feedback and other comments. Thank you for your continued support of our association.


Reprinted from IPA Bulletin, Volume 25, Number 2