IPA Bulletin

Presidents Report

 Edmond Chiu

< Brazil, the land of pampas and gauchos, warm hospitality and churrascarias, fun-loving and at the same time seriously committed to other people's quality of life, has again been the host for an IPA Regional Meeting. Following the successful São Paulo meeting in 1997 and the Cancun, Mexico, gathering in 1995, our recent meeting in Porto Alegre marked the beginning of a collegial collaboration of Latin American health professionals determined to advance IPA's mission for this region: improvement of the mental health of older persons.

Thanks to the energy and leader-ship of João Machado (Brazil) and David Resnikoff (Mexico) and their colleagues, a superb meeting was organized on fairly short notice. Colleagues from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay assembled a Latin American net-work that will collaborate on development of an agenda for Latin America. Foremost in this agenda are the educa-tion and training of health professionals in the region and understanding the epidemiology of mental disorders in the elderly.

We are grateful to our hosts, the Brazilian Association of Geriatric Neuropsychiatry (ABNPG), which generously changed their meeting date, with all consequential problems, to accommodate and include our meeting as a Joint Meeting. This generosity of spirit, together with their energy and creativity, is indeed admirable.

The experience of establishing this Latin American network through Regional Meetings underscores IPA's commitment to extending our efforts to other regions in need of development in psychogeriatrics. We hope our European and Mediterranean Regional Meeting in Rome (17-20 April 2002) will attend to establishment of a network in that region, and that the Asian Pacific Regional Meeting in Hong Kong (October/November 2002) will do the same in that part of the world. The regions of the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa await, but IPA is fully conscious of their needs.

Reprinted from IPA Bulletin, Volume 17, Number 4