IAPO Board Meeting July 2003
From 11-13 July, our Governing Board met for the second time this year in London. Following the progress IAPO has made in building its sustainability and communications in the last six months, all the Board Members were full of energy and innovative ideas to ensure that IAPO continues to strengthen and move forward. This progress includes having successfully developed two monthly newsletters, a new logo, a redesign of The Patient's Network and a total restructuring and integration of our administrative and communication systems.

Membership
The most important item on the Board Meeting agenda was a discussion and planning session on how to implement the vision of the patients' organizations who founded IAPO - to become a full Membership organization. This is so important for IAPO, as it will ensure that our Member groups can fully participate in IAPO's planning, development and policies through their votes and through the Annual General Meeting. It is also essential for our credibility as an organization representing patients worldwide.

The Governing Board has developed a draft proposal based on the work and plans that many patients' organizations were involved in during IAPO's formation. We are planning a full consultation with all Networkers during September and October, as it is vital that the proposed membership plans and fees are approved by them. We aim to officially begin membership on 1 January 2004 and have our first ever Annual General Meeting in December 2004 - this will be the first time that all of these organizations will have the opportunity to meet together, so this very important in the international patient movement and something we are very excited about. We may also be able to plan an accompanying regional or international conference for patients' organizations. We would recommend that those interested in sponsorship opportunities for this significant event get in touch with us for further details.

Website Progress
The redevelopment of our website www.patientsorganizations.org is continuing well, and we are delighted with the progress made. There is one particular feature we would like to inform you of, called The Patients' Exchange. This will be a discussion forum where patients' organizations around the world can communicate with each other to:
- exchange views
- give advice and support
- share expertise and experiences
- discuss issues
- build solidarity and aid collaboration

Resource Share
The Patients' Exchange will also contain a Resource Share for patients' organizations to exchange useful written information, guidelines or articles about how to start, run, fund and develop an effective patients' organization. Of course, some information will be specific to certain countries or regions, but we believe that sharing across countries will give access to new and different ideas and helpful information. If you have anything you could contribute to the Resource Share then please consider sending it to me - as well as written information as described above, I would also be interested in any recommendations for websites or books that may be useful. All information given will be fully credited, with details of contributor, author, date of publication, original target audience and so on. We are hoping that we will be ready to launch the new website later in the summer - watch this space!!

Also note that at present there are two sponsorship opportunities for the website - one to sponsor a multi-lingual feature (requires $5,000 only) and another to enhance the Global Directory of Patients' Organizations (requires $12,000). If you would like further information about these opportunities then do get in touch with me.

The Patient's Network
Hopefully many of you should have received the June 2003 issue of The Patient's Network (Issue 18) - we hope you found the information and articles on health literacy interesting and stimulating, and that the Checklist on page 11 will be helpful when producing information for patients, or when working with other stakeholders on patient information. On the new website there will be an area for posting comments and questions arising from the most recent TPN, so if you have any views to communicate, send them to me now to start off the discussion on Issue 18.

AESGP Meeting - IAPO Chair participates on Patient Panel
IAPO participated in the Annual Meeting of the Association of the European Self-Medication Industry (AESGP) in Cannes, France from 4-6 June. Our Chair, Albert van der Zeijden, was invited to particpate in a Patient Panel. Many speakers at the Meeting emphasized the need for a switch from prescription medication to self-help medication. This is important for patients in Europe, as this also means a switch from reimbursement of the medication cost to self-payment.

IAPO favours free access to medication as a principle, so Albert van der Zeijden told the audience that IAPO supports the switch to self-medication, but also that “it is a misunderstanding to think that the only way to look to this is that the self-medication status is a reason to exclude the medicine from the reimbursement system, whilst the prescription status means acceptance for reimbursement. If the only way to buy freedom of choice is to punish people with high and unavoidable consumption of medicines with unbearable costs, it is questionable whether this right of free choice is worth the burden”. Albert emphasized that there is a different way to handle this: “In the future every medicine with a market authorization has two manifestations: prescription medicine for all medical unavoidable use, covered by the reimbursement systems and self-medication, with only a few exceptions, for which is paid out-of-pocket. So the reimbursement of a medicine is not connected with the medicine, but with the medical condition for which it is prescribed”.