IPA Bulletin
President's Message

By Masatoshi Takeda

As president of IPA, I am honored to address a message to our members for the first time in our Bulletin. I like IPA. I think IPA’s activity is important, and I believe being an IPA member is very important. I understand my responsibility as the president of IPA is huge especially in this difficult economic period and I wish to express my willingness to serve IPA to make it even more dynamic and prosperous.

I became a member of IPA in 1989 when the 4th IPA Congress was held in Tokyo. After serving on the Board of Directors for eight years, I was elected to be secretary in 2005 and, in 2007, I organized the 13th Osaka Silver Congress. Through my involvement with IPA, I have had the opportunity to get acquainted with many leaders in Psychogeriatrics in the world, which is the most precious gift from IPA. In this way, I served IPA and IPA reciprocated me with even greater gifts. Now I feel it is my responsibility to give the members of IPA a similar good experience as the one I had through belonging to and being active in IPA.

IPA’s mission, Better Mental Health for Older People, has been unchanged for 27 years since our launching in 1982 and we want to make IPA’s activity and image more visible, more influential, more multi-disciplinary, and more international. In order to attain these goals, we need to have a more solid foundation in finance, with more members and more active participation by the Board of Directors and all members of IPA.

Let me begin my term as president by introducing our new officers and members of the IPA Executive Committee for the 2009-2011 term. I am so proud of having Jacobo Mintzer, a man of energy and full of innovative ideas, as the president-elect. As we face the many financial challenges in today’s world, I am certain Jacobo’s knowledge and talents especially with his recently acquired MBA degree will be strong assets in the Executive Committee. Next, is Jill Rasmussen, a primary care physician and self-employed, private consultant from the UK, who has been leading IPA’s corporate strategy committee for many years and her efforts have resulted in a corporate partner relationship with our publisher, Cambridge University Press. Jill will serve as the treasurer of IPA and her business knowledge will be helpful to oversee our budgets and associated plans. Daniel O’Connor, a well-known old age psychiatrist in Melbourne serves as secretary of IPA. Daniel has been an active member of IPA since 1989. His well-balanced and flexible way of thinking will add another facet to our team. Horácio Firmino, a psychiatrist from Coimbra, Portugal, will serve as treasurer-elect. Horacio founded the Gerontopsychiatric Unit at the Psychiatric Clinic of the Coimbra University Hospitals in 1990 and is actively involved in Psychogeriatric service. As a well-trained psychotherapist, his participation will surely make our executive team more integrated and productive. Of course Helen Chiu will be guiding us as the immediate past president to keep the continuity of IPA’s activity and Susan Oster, the executive Director of IPA, is now an indispensable person in all aspects of IPA activity.

IPA’s main activities are meetings, education and publications. As for the meetings in the future, we will keep to our principle of organizing an IPA Congress in every odd year. We started the IPA Congress in various cities: 1st in Cairo, 2nd in Umea, 3rd in Chicago, and 4th in Tokyo, and then many other major cities. The 13th congress was in Osaka to celebrate IPA’s 25th anniversary, where we had 2,400 delegates and 903 presentations. The 14th IPA Congress was just held in Montréal, Canada and was co-chaired by Serge Gauthier and Nathan Herrmann under the main theme, Path to Prevention. I want to congratulate them on the successful organization of the 14th IPA Congress.

In the past few years, we have renamed the Regional Meeting to now call it the International Meeting to more accurately reflect the truly international setting and the global program it offers. We may reduce the number of these international meetings from a total of 1 to 2 meetings each year to just 1 meeting each year. I am happy to announce that our next International Meeting will be in Santiago de Compostela, Spain co-chaired by Raimundo Mateos and Manuel Franco. The 15th IPA Congress will be in The Hague, Netherlands, co-chaired by Anne Margriet Pot and Frans Verhey. We will also continue to offer educational workshops to supplement our meeting schedule.

Taking advantage of telecommunication and the internet, we believe we can offer more education and professional development with fewer actual meetings. The Learning Portal of IPA is now actively used worldwide.

As for publications, our journal, International Psychogeriatrics, has been renewed in contents and also in appearance this year as we went to a new A-4 format and new cover. The publication has attained the Impact Factor of 2.098 owing to the dedicated work of the chief editor David Ames, deputy editors Nicola Lautenschlager, and John O’Brien, and the other associate editors. Since Cambridge University Press is now our corporate partner, I believe International Psychogeriatrics will truly be the leading journal in our field. In addition, I believe the new coming editor-in-chief, Nicola Lautenschlager, will make our journal even more influential and informative.

As reported in our last issue of the IPA Bulletin, IPA is now in the process of dynamic transformation to become even stronger as we face the change in the relationship between healthcare professional associations and pharmaceutical companies. As I said before, we need to be more solid in finances, more visible in our activities, and more influential to academia and service professionals. IPA’s value is in its multi-disciplinary focus in terms of profession, institution, social system, and geographic region… all are aiming for the better mental health for the older people in the world.

I think the most urgent matter is to increase membership in IPA. Strangely enough, IPA has only a thousand members now, which is quite below the 1,500-2,500 registrations to the usual IPA Congress. I believe IPA has much value but we need to do more to increase this value, inform the field about this value and thus increase the IPA community. This will enable the association to be of even greater value to its members, the field and to our patients. Membership is the top priority in my term. Through the close collaboration with many other psychogeriatric societies, we see this as another way to increase the number of members in IPA.

As announced in the last IPA Bulletin, we are working to transform IPA from our former business model to a new organizational model with increased value for our members and other stakeholders. The potential for adding value to each member of IPA and professional in the field is great. Our challenge is to identify the greatest needs and the best opportunities and then to focus our efforts to deliver these relevant programs and services. The Board is eagerly hard at work to design this new model and we will be seeking your input into these plans. Please give us your ideas and suggestions. I will provide updates on our progress to you in the near future.

I look forward to working with you and for you.


Reprinted from IPA Bulletin, Volume 26, Number 4