From the CEO's desk: a busy month

What a busy and active month it has been! The new Bangkok Secretariat continues to grow and progress, and there’s a much more detailed article about us elsewhere in the newsletter, where you can get to know Nongluck and Sumalee better.

Direct Membership

One of our main focuses this month has been to respond to the growing number of applications we have received for Direct Member status. This has been really encouraging, and we hope to persuade many more people to take up this form of membership. Not only does Direct Membership offer you the chance to be even more directly engaged with WONCA’s activities, through more direct news and information, but there are many additional benefits, with possibly the most attractive being discounted conference registration fees at many WONCA conferences, including Prague in 2013. If you haven’t looked into this before I urge you to do so now – we have now put links onto the website so that you can download the application form and instruction of how to pay the subscription, which for most countries can now be done on line via PayPal. Just go to the banner at the top of the website home page, click on “Member Interest” and follow the link “For individual doctors”

Membership Organization questionnaire

We have also gone out to all Member Organizations (MOs) with a short questionnaire in an effort to ensure that our contact details for all MOs is as up to date as it can be. Inevitably with 126 MOs it’s almost impossible to be 100% accurate, as personnel and contact details change and we don’t necessarily get informed of the changes, but we want to keep in contact as best we can, hence our current drive. Sumalee has prime responsibility for all membership issues and she can be contacted on [email protected]. She admits that she gets a real buzz coming into the office in the morning to see how many new applications and contact mails have arrived overnight, and she’s really enjoying making many new friends and acquaintances. Please do encourage your own MO to get the replies back to us as soon as possible – apart from anything else the responses have a direct bearing on voting rights at the 2013 World Council, so it’s vital that we have this information.

WONCA Archives

Finally for this month the archive material has arrived from Singapore. It will take a while to sort through it thoroughly and to be able to catalogue the most important material, but Karen Flegg, WONCA Editor, will be publishing occasional articles in forthcoming WONCA Newsletters which I think will give a fascinating glimpse at the history and development of WONCA over the years.

Garth Manning
WONCA CEO
[email protected]