Report of our Annual General Meeting

Our 2014 Annual General Meeting took place in Brussels on 12-13 May. This year again, we provided our members with the opportunity to meet, exchange and celebrate their being part of the European Patients’ Movement. The first day of our 2014 AGM was themed "Night Before the Elections". With the upcoming EU Elections, we wanted to emphasise the importance of patient participation as this time is truly like no other. We had the pleasure of welcoming David Earnshaw of Burson-Marsteller and EuropeDecides to speak about why these elections are different and how we, as patients, can make our voices heard.

Following last year’s meeting dedicated to the celebration of our 10th Anniversary, our Annual General Meeting marked the start of the effective implementation of our Strategic Plan 2014-2020. The AGM approved the 2013 Annual Report (link, PDF) which documents all our activities during the past year and also the 2014 Work Plan (link, PDF) that outlines our focus of the next months.

 

 

Thematic Workshops

Three very important fringe meetings took place around the Annual General Meeting. We launched two members’ working groups on patient empowerment and access that will help to coordinate and consolidate our work in these key areas. Our working group on Access will feed into the new Access Partnership, for instance. We also held an important meeting led by our Youth Group, where EPF members discussed how to embed further young patients’ perspective in EPF‘s work.

Reports on these meetings and follow up on progress on the Access Partnership will featurein the next issue of the Newsletter. EPF members also had the opportunity to be updated on the European Patient Academy on Therapeutic Innovation, EUPATI, which EPF is coordinating. Jytte Lyngvig, PhD, Director of The Global Forum for Therapeutic Innovation & Regulatory Science (DIA Europe) and co-leader of EUPATI’s work package 4 shared exciting news on the project’s progress and challenges. We are currently finalising the recruitment process for the certificate course for 50 patient leaders, which will kick off in September 2014.

All the pictures of our AGM are available both on our FlickR and Facebook accounts.

Contact: Nicola Bedlington, EPF Executive Director, nicola.bedlington@eu-patient.eu.