2. News from the President
The ISPO President is elected to the Executive Board and holds the position for the triennium elected. To contact our current President, Dan Blocka, email dan@ispoint.org
Recent Activities and Events
I would first like to wish all of our members, National Member Societies and partners the best of wishes for 2009 and I hope all of you had a festive time bringing in the new year. It is really amazing to think that we are half way through this triennium for ISPO and as my time as President of the Society. The past eighteen months or so has been a very busy, challenging and enjoyable time for myself. I have had the privilege of meeting many of you at various events and meetings across the globe. That in itself has been a “real” gift for me and I hope I can continue to keep up my commitment to support and attend as many national and regional meetings as possible for the rest of the triennium.
Since the start of the triennium, all of our Board has been very busy working on many initiatives that will be reported on at our Interim International Committee Meeting (IC16) on Wednesday February 11th in Bangkok, Thailand. This meeting will allow us to give all the National Member Societies an important update and report on a number of issues dealing with constitutional renewal, website re-development, finances, world congress 2010, educational activities and so on.
During this meeting I will give a President’s Report which will summarize the triennium to date. In an attempt to allow the wider membership to access some of this information, I will make this report available over a webpage I have created at the following address:http://homepage.mac.com/eaglesmoon/IC16_PresidentsReport
Please visit this webpage after February 13th and the presentation should be available for viewing via a streaming Quicktime file or similar. I hope that many of you who will not be in Bangkok will get the opportunity to view this and see where we are at this point in the triennium.
On a final note, I wanted to inform the membership of one important event that took place in the past number of months. As many of you are aware, in the past five or so years there has been a significant increase in ISPO activity around the development of Prosthetic and Orthotic education along with the promotion of our international standards. This, of course, is also part of our collaboration with the World Health Organization. Further to this point, there was an important meeting in Wuhan, China this past November 5th and 6th titled, “A National Workshop on the Launching of the Guidelines for Training Personnel in Developing Countries for Prosthetic and Orthotic Services”. During this meeting the official release of our ISPO/WHO Guidelines in the Chinese language took place in the presence of many of the stakeholders and partners involved in the development of Prosthetic and Orthotic education and services in China.
[click to zoom] Official release of the Guidelines for Training Personnel in Developing Countries for Prosthetic and Orthotic Services, Wuhan, China - November 5 & 6, 2008
At the moment there is much activity in China around this development and we are very supportive of the directions being taken by our friends and partners in China. On that note I would like to thank my colleagues Chapal Khasnabis, Sepp Heim and Dirk Böcker for all their hard work and support around these initiatives in China and also Otto Bock for their support through the Otto Bock Foundation. The photo below is of all the participants who attended the meeting.
In the next issue of our Newsletter, I hope to report further on the outcomes of our meetings in Bangkok and the direction ahead as we get closer to our next World Congress in 2010.
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