Dear Friends,
If 2020 has been an exercise in resilience, FIGIJ has certainly risen to the challenge!
The pandemic has given rise to opportunities with a plethora of on-line virtual meetings and great progress in governance, education and advocacy for us as an organisation.
We have participated in webinars with a first International Fellows session – a first for us and in Spanish – and we plan for there to be more. New educational aids are being uploaded onto the website. We have also supported a statement published on International Youth Day aimed at protecting adolescent health in the Covid-19 response.
Please watch this space for exciting developments on the advocacy front with global themes and new position statements by FIGIJ on a variety of topics aimed for release in 2021.
We continue to share a close working relationship with FIGO and are participating in the FIGO African and East Mediterranean Congress in December. Whereas this will be virtual we hope to increase our profile and increase membership. Our session is titled “Breaking Downs Barriers in Adolescent Health” and is diverse and topical – we hope to be able to share the presentations with you in due course.
On the membership front we have written to 98 national obstetric and gynaecological organisations not currently represented in FIGIJ (including Fiji!) introducing ourselves in English, Spanish, French and Mandarin as necessary. Responses have been muted but at least we cannot say we have not tried. We have also completely revised the Statutes and have taken on board all your feedback during the consultation period. This piece of work is now complete and has been distributed for approval. Please use you votes to approve the new Statutes we can move on to FIGIJ’s real work. The deadline is the end of December so please return us your completed ballot papers as soon as you can.
The Board is looking at ways of increasing access and visibility for the IFEPAG examination and held our first virtual on-line oral examinations in 2020 successfully.
Please look at our website regularly as there are more updates than ever. Most recently a series of presentations linked to a new Pan-European Post-Specialty PAG curriculum have been uploaded, and this is a very exciting development. Also please encourage your National Society members to take a look at what we are offering on our website.
I cannot fail to update on our financial position. We can share with you where we are following on from a decision made some years ago to transfer our registration from Switzerland to the United States. This has enabled us to invest our money and the investments have actually performed extremely well. The downside has been that the legal costs of the transfer have far exceeded that which anyone anticipated. At present our annual projected expenditure linked to legal and bank fees as well as running the website is not likely to be met by the income raised by membership fees, and we need to remain solvent. Annual fees were reduced at the World Congress in Hong Kong to facilitate membership of FIGIJ, and we would wish to avoid raising the subscriptions in the future. At present we are constrained in what we can spend and any suggestions whereby we can increase our funding streams in the future shall be gratefully received, subject to appropriate ethical channels.
I have very deliberately not mentioned any individuals within this message as there are so many of you who have contributed so much that the list would be too long to compile, but at a personal level and on the behalf of the Board I would like to thank each and every one of you for all that you have done for us in 2020 and will continue to do in 2021 to develop and strengthen FIGIJ.
As we approach the traditional Seasonal rest with reflections and opportunities to spend time with our families, let us look forward to a happy, productive and above all healthy 2021.
Season’s greetings
Paul Wood
President FIGIJ