Presidential Address

After the Vienna Spring Meetings in March

After spending 3 hectic days in the elegant “De France” hotel on Schottenring in downtown Vienna, I'm pleased to report that we have again taken important steps  in our Society's path.

Some  highlights:

• Selection of a professional congress organizer (PCO) for the EUGMS Congresses 2017 - 2019. And after a tight, fair and transparent competition the Winner is:  Aristea.  The other excellent finalists were KIT from Germany and MCI from Switzerland. Aristea is an Italian company founded in 1988 with offices in Genova, Rome and Brussels, who have been working with the EUGMS successfully for the Venice congress in 2013 and will work for the Lisbon Congress in 2016. Only one company could win, but I was delighted of the interest in our Society,  the high standard of the bidders and in particular of the finalists.
• Proceedings for the upcoming annual congress in Oslo are going well and the Academic Board is working hard with the scientific committee to develop a first class program. Please promote the congress and send abstracts, deadline for them is 15th of April.  To remind of the JAMA connection: if you think your research would interest a high-profile general journal, submit your abstract and be ready to prepare the full paper during spring. Please inform the Academic Director, Athanase Benetos of your intention.
• As President of the 2014 Rotterdam Congress Jaap Krulder was pleased to confirm an excellent final result for the Society. Our cordial thanks to the Rotterdam Steering Committee for this great success.
• The Strategic and Executive Boards have also started to formulate a transparent "standard operating procedure" to select future congress sites.
• After a first day of the Full Board Meeting to cover the formal agenda, we continued this year’s from lunch to lunch meeting with an interactive day. Regina Roller had organized a "World Café" with  4 corners and all of them were crowded with lively discussions.  Maybe  a successful experiment should not be repeated, but in this case I'm sure an exception confirms the rule. The initiation to prolong and activate the spring meeting came from the Full Board, so this really was your achievement. The many ideas which flourished in the Café have been collected and will be used as input by the Strategic and Executive Boards.
• We have now been working for a year with our Vienna office, and as president I have been extremely happy with our  - not only friendly – but also highly competent staff, Andrea and Georg. An efficient HQ is needed when we further strengthen our cooperation with EU and EC bodies, work with EU projects, promote courses (like the successful TNT Geri), and develop cooperation with the European Interdisciplinary Council on Ageing, as well as with our new Core-PCO.
• EUGMS has two important interfaces to the world, our journal EGM, and our renewed  website, please utilize them and submit material to our Journal.
• On the more social side it was great pleasure to hand out the" togetherness" plates to  past presidents, Alfonso Cruz Jentoft, Paul Knight, and Jean-Pierre Michel. This gift is a modest "Thank you" for the devoted work my predecessors have done for the benefit of the EUGMS.
• We will be looking forward to your #nominations for the upcoming vacancies on the Executive Board.
• BTW: an interesting paper about preventing cognitive decline among older persons at risk of dementia  appears on 12 March on The Lancet website (the FINGER study principal results, www.lancet.com)
• And on EUGMS’ objectives an article in Health Management Journal Strandberg T. Fostering geriatric medicine in Europe. HealthManagement 2015;15(1):22.