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From the WGA Executive Office
Kuldev Singh (Stanford), Jonathan Crowston (Melbourne)
This year is one of transition for the Executive Vice President's Office and while much of our efforts have been directed towards grasping our new roles, we have begun two exciting initiatives that we would like to share with the IGR readership.
The Global Consensus Meetings have been wildly successful, both in terms of meeting structure as well as output in the form of publications. The proceedings of the fifth such meeting focusing on screening for both open-angle and angle-closure glaucoma will soon be in press. These meetings generate a massive amount of information that is sometimes difficult to summarize in a brief lecture. Jonathan Crowston has taken on the important task of developing slide sets summarizing the most important points from each consensus meeting that has already taken place. Slide sets will also be developed for future meetings. The goal in developing these slide sets is to disseminate consensus information to each glaucoma society and, ultimately, each member of our global glaucoma com-munity, to be used for presentation and discussion at meetings held throughout the world.
Jonathan has assembled a group of talented individuals, Esther Hoffmann, Arthur Sit, Tony Wells and Winnie Nolan, each of whom has participated in prior consensus meetings and served on the WGA Associate Advisory Board. These individuals have already begun working on consensus presentations which we hope to have completed and available on line for the membership by the end of 2008. Every successful global society in any discipline has a method to reward individuals who contribute towards making it successful. To date, the WGA has not had an awards program to recognize such contributions. The WGA Executive Office is in the process of preparing an outline for an awards program that will recognize both the duration and quality of service to WGA. Individuals who serve with distinction on Committees, for example, will be recognized in IGR and at future World Congress meetings.
This awards program will also recognize major contributions to glaucoma as a profession. While we already have IGR Awards for the top scientific papers each year, we have not as yet developed a method to recognize glaucoma educators, patient care advocates, philanthropists and humanitarians who are working throughout the world, either with or without WGA assistance, towards achieving the goals of our Association. We believe that there is no better way to promote excellence than appropriately recognizing it.
