Organising the meeting on functional decline

In my last blog I said that I would write a bit more about the meeting I am supposed to organise. Or rather WE are supposed to organise. Organising a big event is something you can never do alone. I am lucky that we have such a good team at both the ministry in the Netherlands and at the WHO. We all collaborate to arrange speeches, catering, speakers, participants, papers and many more things. I am now busy with a kind of project sheet where all tasks and deadlines are included so we can monitor the progress.

Actually it is not even a big conference but a more restricted high level meeting. The purpose is not to have as many powerpoint presentations as possible (no power and no point) but to work in working groups and together come to a shared agenda. People from various countries will be present to express what their country needs and what gaps in knowledge and policy exists. Representatives from various international organisation will listen and try to identify what they can do to contribute to innovative solutions.

But to what? What is the topic of the conference? It is a mouth full as we say in Dutch: Building systems to manage and prevent functional decline in ageing populations. In other and more simple words. There are more and more older people. We need to prevent that they become frail and need costly cure and care and we want the to live independent and happy. And if they become frail and need care, we must organise it in an efficient and patientfriendly manner. And - that is where WHO has much expertise - how this can be done in different countries with different income levels and cultural backgrounds.

We have to organise this in just three months time. That is a bit of a challenge. Luckily we gained one more week as the flower parade in Holland resulted in fully booked hotels on the date we envisaged (we checked for other big conferences but not for flower parades, which I should have known as they come through my street every year). So we had to postpone it with a week. Still time is limited. Getting people from all over the world will take time as they need visa and time in their agenda. Writing backgroundpapers is also something that takes time. But I am confident it can be done.

Of course we donot know relevant people from all countries in the world. But we can use the regional network from WHO to ensure that we will have a good mix of interesting countries and people. WHO has 6 regional offices in Cairo, Washington, Copenhagen, Brazaville (Congo), New Delhi and Manilla. In each of these offices there is a coordinator for ageing (and sometimes also other topics) who knows many people. And in hq (head quarters in geneva as they say here) they also have many contacts.

Next time I will probably write a bit more about functional decline in movies. The Rotterdam Film Festival will start this week and although I am not able to go to many movies this year, I am in the mood for cinema... But as said that will be next week

Fred Lafeber