International Journal for Quality in Health Care 16:93-96 (2004)
© International Society for Quality in Health Care and Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved
ISQua Annual Report to Members |
Annual Report to Members
This report was presented by the ISQua President, David Ballard, and members of the ISQua Executive Board at the Annual General Meeting of the Society in Dallas, USA, 4 November 2003Dr David Ballard, ISQua President
Dr Ballard in introducing the annual President’s Report noted that this meeting marked the transition of his presidency to Dr Austin Leahy who would succeed him at the close of the meeting.
He identified several signs of the health of the Society as would be covered in the various Board reports. ‘For me, these included:
- First, the strength of ISQua membership in terms of both Individual and Institutional Members.
- It was very gratifying to see the interest in serving in the capacity of Journal Editor following the distinguished service of Professor Heather Palmer in that position. Many impressive candidates applied for the Editor position and ISQua was able to select someone who we consider to be an exceptional candidate to be the Editor, Professor Thomas Perneger in Switzerland.
- In addition, ISQua received nominations from several very strong candidates for the incoming 2003–2005 Board, and through the election process, members selected outstanding individuals to succeed this Board.
- The Society has had a very strong financial performance over the year. While we were able to achieve substantial sponsorship given the commitments that are required for booking a hotel in the United States, there will be some significant financial losses related to the lower than anticipated registration for this conference. This situation relates in part to some of the homeland security issues in the United States as well as many competing meetings both in the United States and throughout the world. Having said this, the Society is very strong, very vibrant. The intellectual content for this conference is outstanding. Many very positive comments have been made about the programs for both the main conference and the pre-conference workshops.
At our annual meeting we welcome the opportunity to report on the progress of the Society so that members are fully informed about ISQua’s activities. Using the same format as last year, members of the Board who each lead a policy portfolio, will now report to the meeting.’
Education Portfolio
Professor Austin Leahy
Professor Leahy extended his thanks to the members of the Education Committee. ‘There is a commitment in the interest of the Society to provide education meetings within regional areas of the world particularly in those where ISQua has not had a recent conference. The two areas which are most likely to see this development are probably the Middle East and in the Far East. The purpose of these education meetings is not to mirror our annual conference activity but they will be targeted education efforts aimed at developing interests in areas such as hospital accreditation, primary care accreditation, patient safety. These would be official ISQua events twinned with a local quality society. While having important education content, they are also intended to stimulate interest in quality in these areas and are a direct response to enquiries from our membership.
The other area in which the Committee has interest is the ISQua website which has tremendous potential and opportunities for development beyond just publishing abstracts and illustrations from these conferences.
My thanks go to Mrs Lee Tregloan for her contribution to the Committee and also all the members of the Committee; in particular, Ms Hilary Coates.’
Publications Portfolio
Dr Heather Buchan
On behalf of Dr Buchan, the CEO, Mrs Tregloan reported ‘This has been a very special year for the publication portfolio particularly in relation to the International Journal for Quality in Health Care. As all members are probably aware, Dr Palmer will be moving on after ten years in the Editor’s position, during which time we have seen the Journal transformed into the highly regarded publication we have today and this has been aided since 1998 by the excellent support of Oxford University Press as co-owner and publisher of the Journal.
Last evening, a special reception was held here to celebrate the Journal and Dr Palmer’s success in leading its development as a significant and very international journal which is a rarely achieved status elsewhere. Several people spoke at the reception commending Dr Palmer’s leadership, wisdom and style. There was also praise for the work of Morag Teek who has been Managing Editor and assisting Dr Palmer. While Heather Palmer intends to continue with her other daily professional life, the end of Heather’s term also means the end of the Editorial Office at Harvard. The Portfolio requests that Heather Palmer’s significant effort and the excellent support of Morag Teek and the other editorial office staff, be placed on record.
Shortly, we will be welcoming Professor Thomas Perneger from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, as the new Editor. In closing, we thank Professor Palmer and her staff who should be commended on how the transition to the new Editorial Office is being managed.’
Dr Heather Palmer commented on items in relation to the Journal and reported that the Journal has had a good year. ‘Submissions have increased with the regular author submissions of manuscripts in particular, by about thirty percent. This is good news for our readers because it means we can be more selective although it is not such good news for the workload in the Editorial Office or for authors, as it also means that the rejection rate increases. However in general it is very good news for the future of the Journal.
The impact factor, while not sustaining the very high upward ‘blip’ of last year, is on a steady upward trend. Subscriptions, including now a switch to on-line subscriptions have increased, and the Journal will this year return to the Society more by way of surplus funds than it did last year.
In summary, we have addressed some of the specifics on how we are going to handle the transfer to Dr Perneger who has secured a Managing Editor, and they expect to begin operations from 1 December. This means that new submissions after 1 December will go on-line simultaneously with Dr Perneger’s Editorship. As from that date, only on-line submission will be accepted.
The first two issues for next year are either at Oxford University Press or on their way there so that Dr Perneger’s decisions will begin to take affect in the 3rd issue of 2004 and for the first half of next year will carry both editor’s names.
We recommend that interested authors keep informed via the website to check on changes about submission procedures.’
Dr Palmer announced the winners for the 2002 Reizenstein Prize which is given in honour of Peter Reizenstein who was the first editor of the Journal. ‘The Prize is a gift of £500 provided by Oxford University Press and a certificate from ISQua. The Prize is awarded through a very careful process of voting and assessing papers over the past year and in which all the Editorial Committee members participated, excluding the Editor.
We have agreed on a winner for this year. The paper by Kable, Gibberd and Spigelman from Australia is titled: Adverse events in surgical patients in Australia.
The runner up papers were:
From Britain: The Leeds University Maternity Audit Project by Wilson, Thornton, Hewison, Lilford, Watt, Braunholtz and Robinson. This was a paper that attracted attention in the British press with The Observer particularly highlighting it.
From Malaysia: Assessing doctors’ competence: application of the CUSUM technique in monitoring doctors’ performance by Lim, Soraya, Ding and Morad.
From Australia: The Victorian Emergency Department Collaboration by Bartlett, Cameron and Cisera.
These authors should all be applauded for their work and Iinvite Professor Bob Gibberd, one of the winning authors to accept the cheque for the 2002 Reizenstein Prize.’
Mrs Tregloan indicated there had been work on redesigning the website and advised it was intended to extend it to include much more resources information; she also requested input for this from the membership.
‘We can also celebrate the publication of the report which was commissioned from ISQua by the World Health Organization (WHO) three years ago and we commend Dr Charles Shaw as our Principle Investigator, who put so much work into the report. There are some advance copies available for those people who contributed to the report. ISQua will be managing an ordering system for this publication which is called Quality and Accreditation and Healthcare Services. It is a great achievement and also good to see ISQua’s logo being attached to a WHO publication.’
Membership Portfolio
Dr Hugo Arce
Dr Arce reported on the number of members for 2003:
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As a comparison, the membership for 2002 had been 649.
‘ISQua has made an effort during the last two years to increase the number of Institutional Members. During this year’s conference in Dallas we held the 2nd Institutional Membership meeting and we are planning for next year a new package for Institutional Members.’
Dr Arce advised that the membership fees had been reviewed and it had been decided to regulate the level of fees in future by using Australian dollars as the baseline. The 2004 membership rate would be AUD 195.00 for Individual and AUD 1016.00 for Institutional Members.
Dr Arce extended his thanks to Mrs Elma Heidemann and also to Dr Strasimir Cucic for their assistance with this portfolio.
Indicators Portfolio
Dr John Helfrick
Dr Helfrick reported that the Dallas Indicators Summit was well attended with over 100 delegates and the program was extremely well received this year. ‘The Summit program included a number of plenary sessions commencing initially on the first day with an environmental overview and completing on the second day with a debate on transparency of reporting as it relates to Indicators. We had two major poster sessions managed by Dr Haya Rubin which started out with each individual providing an overview of their poster. Finally, because last year we received many recommendations for having workshops with more interaction, this year we scheduled three workshops which were all well attended. Jan Mainz gave a workshop on ‘How to develop an indicator’ and Jerod Leob took it to the next level with ‘What is a quality indicator’ and Irma Arispe’s session was on ‘How government uses the information gained from the use of the indicators’. The response was positive. As usual, at the close we ask for comments and recommendations and the principle comment we had was to have the break-out rooms closer to one another so when you get to that point you know that you have had a good meeting.’
‘Already there is talk about next year’s Summit and what might be included. One of the things being considered that has been topical at this conference is the interface between E-health and performance measurement. The program for 2004 is currently being developed and we are sure this will also be a great Summit.’
Dr Ballard thanked Dr Helfrick for his excellent work with leading the Indicators Portfolio, emphasizing that this was the third consecutive year in which ISQua received funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in the USA.
Public Affairs Portfolio
Mrs Elma Heidemann
Mrs Heidemann reported on the successful move of ISQua to new offices. ‘The Secretariat has worked extremely hard this year. There are very few people there and they monitor and perform to an extraordinary extent on our behalf and we wish to formally thank the Secretariat for all that it has done this year and in particular thank Mrs Tregloan for her leadership.’
‘The other part of the Public Affairs portfolio is external liaison, which this year has again included the World Health Organization. You have already heard about one of the publications that is forthcoming from the WHO and there are others that we are trying to get published soon. We will be participating in a major Patient Safety meeting in London next week which is being arranged by the World Health Organization and also the UK Department of Health. We also liaise with the World Bank and we have, with the assistance of Charles Shaw, developed a Toolkit on Accreditation. The Toolkit will be mounted on the website of ISQua shortly and we hope will also be published by The World Bank.
In addition to these links, we also liaise with the International Hospital Federation and with the World Organization for Primary Care Physicians. These links are working well.’
Accreditation Portfolio
Mrs Elma Heidemann
Mrs Heidemann advised that during this year she had also been involved with leading the Accreditation Portfolio and as Chair of the ALPHA Council for only a short time having taken it over from Barbara Donaldson when she completed her position with Quality Health New Zealand. ‘I would like to publicly thank Barbara Donaldson for her leadership of the ALPHA Council for what has been a significant period of time. Quality Health New Zealand’s representative was replaced on the Executive Board and the ALPHA Council by Tineke Stokes. However, Barbara has continued with ISQua in another capacity by providing some executive assistance to get some very significant work completed for ISQua’s ALPHA programs.
The ALPHA Council has met face to face twice during the last year as well as via teleconference and we extend thanks to ANAES in Paris who very kindly hosted the face to face meeting the Council was able to have in July.
The main work of the Council has been to redesign its programs so that we can expand beyond just accrediting organizations. We made a decision in Paris, which has been approved by the Executive Board, to expand what we were doing so we can cover other evaluations organizations. We have revised the ALPHA International Principles for Standards to make them more broadly applicable to the standards of other evaluation organizations. We have also revised the standards which were previously used to accredit accreditation organizations. These are being expanded to accredit other evaluation organizations. We think there is a need for this and also we believe that our ALPHA Program will improve and strengthen if we can make it broader. Needless to say, these two moves necessitated changes to all the operating rules of ALPHA and this has been done as of last Friday.
We have also undertaken a very important research endeavour which will shortly be published. This is a comparison of our accreditation standards for accrediting organizations against ISO standards for similar applications and we have also completed a comparison with one of the national quality awards, EFQM; we have used the European award here. We feel this has been very useful to use, not only as we modify standards, but also we can explain to a wider world how we relate to these other major evaluation processes.
The ALPHA Symposium, which was held on Sunday, was very successful with some good suggestions for next year and we are pleased that our accreditation workshops so far in the conference program have also been successful.’
Conference Portfolio
Professor Yves Matillon
On behalf of Professor Matillon, Mrs Tregloan reported that the conference last year in Paris had been a great success. ‘It was a benchmark for ISQua as it involved 1100 delegates from over 80 countries. This was a special achievement for any international conference. Professor Richard Grol was commended for the excellence of the program and we received enthusiastic feedback afterwards. We were also able to see a positive financial return to the Society of conference surplus funds once all the accounts were settled.
Alas we have to report to members that it is not going to be nearly as good this year. We were planning for nearly twice the number of delegates that we now have here. As Dr Ballard mentioned earlier, for Dallas there seems to be other factors and also a very large number of competing meetings, so we are sorry that the excellent program here chaired by Professor Al Assaf from Okalahoma University has not been as widely supported as we would have liked it to be. Nevertheless, wehave delegates from over 50 countries, which is great, and we have a highly representative group of leaders which have expressed interest in continuing their involvement and interest, which is also very encouraging. However, at our Board meeting yesterday we noted that we need to give notice to you, our members, that the financial report due at the end of this year will not be as nearly as successful as the one for last year.
There have already been meetings on setting the program for Amsterdam and we are also looking beyond 2004 and exploring interests in other areas. The conference program is a flagship event for this organization. There is a lot of hard work and preparation, but we have a very successful track record in sharing expertise and leadership and engaging people as actively as possible in the construction of the program and its delivery. A new innovation for the Amsterdam program will be to establish an International Advisory Faculty for the program and we will very much value the input of members as part of that. This means that conference planning will move forward on an even more collaborative basis—from strength to strength.’
Ms Tregloan also advised that abstracts and PowerPoint files from the Paris conference had been published on ISQua’s website for several months. ‘The National Library of Medicine in the US also has a link to our site which reflects the apparent interest in the ISQua program. We plan to do the same with abstracts and PowerPoints out of the meeting here in Dallas so the impact from the conference will be available for some time yet.’
On behalf of Professor Matillon, Mrs Tregloan also commended the excellent number of sponsors which had been committed to the Dallas meeting and expressed hope that this involvement would stimulate a response on their behalf to return in the future.
Dr Ballard recommended the President’s Report for the approval of the meeting.
At the meeting it was also announced that Mrs Elma Heidemann and Professor Heather Palmer had each been appointed as Life Members of the Society in recognition of their long and excellent contributions to its work.
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