Annual Scientific Meeting of the ICS

barcelona

A Review From The WFIP Perspective of The Annual Scientific Meeting of The Internation Continence Society (ICS), 26-30 August 2013, Barcelona, Spain.

By Lynne van Poelgeest-Pomfret, WFIP President • World Federation of Incontinence Patients

It was perhaps not surprising to find that this year’s ICS annual scientific meeting held in Spain was well attended by Spanish and Latin American health professionals. Since the ICS is a multi-disciplinary society, this meeting is attended by nurses, physiotherapists, doctors and specialists with an interest in urinary and faecal incontinence and pelvic floor dysfunction and pain from around the world.

The WFIP was represented during the entire conference by Elaine McInnes from the NAFC (US), Thomasz Michalek (NTM) Poland, Rosa Daloiso (FINCO) Italy, Jacqueline Cahill and Diaa Rizk (Canadian Continence Foundation), Canada and Lynne van Poelgeest-Pomfret (Netherlands and WFIP in general).

Attendance at the ICS meeting was high – Barcelona is a well loved city for congress participants and there were great opportunities for networking and making new contacts.

WFIP held a meeting with the few members present to reflect mainly on strategies and actions for 2014, including how to further extend our membership which currently stands at 18 member countries. Also to discuss funding opportunites and projects for 2014, either as WFIP stand alone or in co-operation with other organizations. 
Once we have been able to establish which projects are viable for 2014, we will get back to you with an update.

Thomasz and I were able to have a very productive meeting with the new ICS chair, Adrian Wagg and we are looking forward to a new era of support and collaboration with the ICS new style. Again we will keep you posted…..He seemed most keen to work together wit us especially in the light of some of the ongoing European projects like Active and Healthy Aging and the sub-projects like Chronic Conditions Care Management – highly relevant for WFIP.

We also had fruitful discussions with Professor Jens Peter Norgaard from Ferring who will now become a new WFIP sponsor.

Exciting and promising to allow WFIP to enter into a new phase of conducting projects on incontinence-related issues. 

Next steps are to further relations with Ferring, Pfizer, BMS and Grunenthal and to perhaps renew relations with SCA.

We also had separate sessions and a full-scale meeting with various Spanish groups in order to initiate under the auspices of WFIP the setting up of a federation of Spanish patient groups to form one single Spanish pelvic floor association. This was a great meeting under the leadership of WFIP and for the first time multidisciplinary with some 20 experts including patient group leaders, urologists, gynaecologists, physiotherapists, nurses, Director of Care Homes for Barcelona and myself. Next meeting will be early December to introduce more formal measures for the creation of this major federation.