Dear IUGA members,
As this year comes to an end, it is a good time to take a moment and reflect on the events that happened over the last 12 months.
Our major annual event touched down in Vancouver, Canada in June this year where many of you attended the 2017 edition of the IUGA Annual Meeting. The positive feedback we received from the meeting attendees encourages us to continue to offer the best possible experience for all of you. Many thanks go out to Geoff Cundiff and the local organizing committee for being such tremendous hosts.
Throughout the year, the IUGA continued to further expand its member benefits. For those who couldn’t attend the Vancouver meeting, the IUGA Academy is the place to go as it offers you unlimited access to the main IUGA 2017 presentations including videos of the presenter and slides. New materials are added on a regular basis to the Academy, maintained by Alex Digesu and his team in collaboration with the Education Committee chaired by Catherine Matthews and the eLearning subcommittee, now chaired by Howard Goldman who recently took over from Barry O'Reilly. They are working hard to develop accredited (CME) educational content that will soon be exclusively available on the platform to all our members. We are very grateful to all the time and devotion they put in to make this the leading eLearning platform in our field.
Our range of educational programs brought us to Algeria this year where an IUGA Exchange Program took place. Regional Symposia were organized in Nicaragua and Japan, and many IUGA representatives were invited to give lectures around the whole world. As the leading international body specialized in female pelvic health we will continue our outreach and education efforts throughout all continents.
The IUGA surgical database user group is fast expanding as over 100 members have begun using the database. In 2018 I hope we are joined by many of our Spanish speaking members as the database will also be available in Spanish. I encourage all of you to utilize this great IUGA benefit, it is becoming increasingly important to know your own surgical outcomes. We thank Paul Moran for his huge dedication towards this project.
Thanks to Albert De Decker, the IUGA now also has their own podcast channel. The podcasts are freely available and accessible through our website and through the dedicated podcast platforms on SoundCloud and now also on Apple’s iTunes. Initiatives to expand to foreign language podcasts are being considered and we invite those who are interested in participating to contact the IUGA office.
And 2018 will start with a blast as you will experience several very refreshing visible changes. Over the holiday season, the IUGA will migrate its current website to a completely new and fresh website, which also incorporates many changes to our communications and to our back-office structure. With this change, we are also launching a completely new dedicated IUGA Patient Website that will have patient information available in both English and Spanish with links to all our other foreign language patient information leaflets. We are thankful for the support of Phil Toozs-Hobson and his team and the development team at Status Plus to make this a reality. We will soon reach out to our members for feedback and suggestions, so we can further build on improving our online presence in the months to come.
The coming year we’ll be back in Europe with our Annual Meeting and we truly look forward to meeting all of you again in Vienna, Austria, from the 27th to the 30th of June. Registration will open in January, so keep an eye on your inbox, don’t miss your opportunity to register for the early bird discounted member rates!
To conclude, I would sincerely like to thank all of you for your support and dedication to IUGA. On a personal note, I would like to thank Status Plus for the truly outstanding job they are doing, David Casalod, Tessa Benitez and the team have worked tremendously hard this year and I know members can already see and feel the benefits.
On behalf of the board, I wish you and your loved ones every success and happiness in 2018 and I look forward to seeing you all in the new year for another big year for the IUGA!
Lynsey Hayward
IUGA President
