Day 3 RI Congress trip to Helsinki

Day 3 of the trip was the formal business day of Retina International, the AGM or ‘General Assembly’ as it is referred to. Sounds like the United Nations!

The picture here (click on it for large version) is of (left to right) Stephen Jones, our RI Representative, Christine Fasser from Switzerland, Katie Newitt from Dubai, and myself.

Another long day today, with a large agenda to get through. With all due respect to Retina International, this being the formal organisational business meeting I doubt whether… the detailed content is of direct interest to our members so I am not going to report in depth here. Stephen Jones will write up a report in our Autumn paper newsletter and if anyone has any questions they can place a comment here or contact Stephen directly.

One piece of news that is of interest though is that Stephen was elected to the Management Committee of RI. This is healthy for both organisations because Stephen will be an ‘active’ committee member for RI and it strengthens our representation amongst the international community too. Congratulations to Stephen on his election.

Alongside the main General Assembly the Finns had also arranged a separate meeting for young people with RP. This was well attended and RP Fighting Blindness was strongly represented, with several delegates from the UK there lead by Chloe Scaplehorn. Thank you Chloe. We will ask Chloe to write a piece for the Autumn Newsletter as well.

One bugbear for me today though was a really laborious voting process. Each time a decision had to be formalised, for some reason I do not fully understand, every country was asked in turn to cast it’s vote verbally, Thus:

“Australia?”

“Yes”

“Brazil?”

“Yes”

“Canada?”

“Yes”

…. you get the picture … and there are 23 members!

Now I’m all for democratic process, but as with most organisations, many resolutions are always going to be either unanimously accepted or rejected. For example, a vote to allow a group from Iran to join RI was accepted by all in the room. Surely a simple single question, used in the judgement of the Chair of the meeting, would be adequate; thus:

“The proposal is to allow Iran to join as an associate member, this appears to be fully supported by all members present but please indicate now if you would like this to be put to a full vote. If there is no objection this will be recorded in the minutes as a unanimous approval of the proposal”

The laborious voting process should then just be used for issues of contention or potential contention.

This slight moan aside, it was a well run meeting and achieved a lot, including approval of all the various formal reports, admission of new members (Iran, Taiwan, Israel, Spain, Iceland), budgets, work planning for the next two years, arrangement for the next couple of conferences in 2010 and 2012, and some internal ’stuff’.

From an RP Fighting Blindness standpoint I also contributed two items under “Any Other Business”. Firstly I registered our expression of interest in hosting the RI conference in London in 2014 (far enough way to not worry about it for the moment!), for which, if we are all agreed, we would have to submit a formal pitch in 2010.

Secondly I expressed a view that many of the national organisations present should be seeking to collaborate to provide funding for expensive clinical trial work, pointing out that the cost of translational work is far higher than our earlier projects. With the possible exception of the US Foundation Fighting Blindness, each individual organisation would not be able to provide significant, meaningful amounts of money to teams such as that lead by Professor Ali at Moorfields. I have invited expressions of interest from organisations that might like to get involved in a collaborative funding group.

We shall see what happens!

Tomorrow is a day off from formal meetings but I will report on Finnish hospitality!

Tags: clinical trials, collaboration, conference, retina international, retinitis pigmentosa