In-coming President's Report - November 2003

The most important function of our Society is to provide educational resources for its members.

We achieve this mainly through Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM) and I hope that you will attend and participate actively and energetically by submitting work and going to the microphone to contribute to the scientific debate when you see fit to do so. We already have over 160 registrants, and over 159 abstracts. We have many guest speakers this year and the program is a very busy one so I’m sure you will find the meeting stimulating and educational.

The weekend before the ASM will highlight several special meetings including a paediatric day, the confocal workshop (architecture), the ISCD training course and a practitioner’s day. All of these meetings will be held at the Stamford hotel at Sydney airport and the programs are included in the newsletter.

There are several new initiatives that will emerge in the next 12-24 months.

A 3 year Ph D scholarship is being advertised and the closing date is 16th July 2004. The winner of the scholarship will be announced at the Annual General Meeting. We plan on offering an ANZBMS symposium at special societies. This is a simplest way of updating specialists (orthopaedics, respiratory medicine, general medicine, rheumatology and other groups). In the longer term we will aim at having combined, or back-to-back meetings, so that members from our society can benefit from the specialist meeting and visa versa.

In 2005 the scientific meeting will be held in Perth overlapping the Endocrine society meeting by a day and overlapping the Diabetes meeting completely. The plan is to have symposia and topics that will be of interest to members of both societies.

In 2006 we will organise the Asia-pacific Regional IOF meeting. This has been endorsed by council and the board of Osteoporosis Australia. This meeting will occur in around October in Cairns at the convention centre. We will have the ANZBMS Annual Scientific Meeting at the same time so that this will be an international meeting.

I recommend we consider Kakadu National Park for the 2007 ASM and welcome your comments. The ISCD densitometry course will run this year but independent of the ANZBMS. There are two important reasons for this, one being the high cost of this course, the most important is for ANZBMS to develop and run its own densitometry training course in Australia.

Osteoporosis Australia has made important contribution to improving awareness of osteoporosis and this organisation, headed by Judith Stenmark as the CEO and John Hewson as Director are to be thanked and congratulated for their efforts. The organisation also has provided scholarships for osteoporosis and metabolic bone disease and increasing co-operation between our societies will help both grow and provide services to patients as well as investigators and health professionals.

The AHMRC is holding its annual meeting in November 21-26th 2004 in Sydney.

Ethical guidelines require that conflicts of interest or potential conflicts of interest be declared whenever scientific work is presented. We will require this from all members. The format will be a straightforward declaration of affiliations at the bottom of abstract submissions.

Industry symposia – we have two approaches to this, one is to have sponsored or named lectures (as we have this year and the year before) and actually allotted symposia. Council is of the view that speakers at these symposia should receive no honoraria but rather the corporate donations to the society include this in the overall grant. Your comments are welcome.

Please attend the Annual General meeting which will be held at Cypress Lakes Resort on 17th August at 6.00pm as this will give you a chance to tell us what you think and want. If you don’t tell us we are forced to make decisions on your behalf.

Ego Seeman