https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2955-0415
When I was invited to share my reflections on my Presidency of the International Menopause Society (IMS), I was initially uncertain as to how to approach this. However, on reflection, I realize that I have served as a member of the IMS Board during times of substantial change and growth.
In my first term as a Board member, under the presidency of Dr Tobie de Villiers, the IMS held its first World Congress organized by the IMS, as opposed to being organized by the host society. I had the honor to co-Chair the Scientific Program with Dr David Archer. We started with a completely blank slate, as we had no structure upon which to base the Congress program or any schedule for milestones leading up to the Congress. Although the upside of this was that a clean slate gave us the opportunity to create a template specifically for this and future meetings, the Cancun Congress came with many unexpected challenges. These ranged from whether the Cancun venue would be seen as a tourist resort rather than a serious congress venue, through to dolphins in the hotel swimming pool on our first site-inspection. To share a specific example, I recall standing in a totally empty Cancun Congress space with David Genazzani, our congress organizer, the night before the Congress was to begin as all the signage and the essential registration materials were still being held by customs. Nonetheless, David and his team magically managed to have the entire congress set-up released and installed, working through the night I suspect, and the next morning the transformed space appeared as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Subsequently, the IMS has held its own successful World Congresses in Prague (2016) and Vancouver (2018) and, on reflection, management of the World Congress by the IMS has been a very positive step forward.
Up until 2014, the educational focus of the IMS was practitioner education, with community education limited to sharing of key messages on World Menopause Day. Looking back, this seems surprising, but indeed the introduction of community education by the IMS was a substantial departure from past activities. With the support of the Board, I was allowed to trial the development of a series of short YouTube videos for women that provided simple and clear, evidence-based information about the menopause. These were launched on YouTube in January 2015, have had over 50,000 views, and have since been translated into Vietnamese and Chinese. In order to launch the videos, we had to establish an IMS YouTube ‘channel’ which has since served us well as a conduit for education of practitioners and the broader community. Our YouTube presence has been followed by expansion into social media with an IMS Facebook page and the new IMS website, soon to be launched.
There has also been progressive expansion of the health practitioner education program, initially through regional meetings in Mumbai (2013), Taipei (2015) and Belgrade (2017), in collaboration with host societies. This was followed by the development of the IMPART (IMS Professional Activity for Refresher Training) Program, instigated by Dr Duru Shah during the presidencies of Dr Rod Baber and Dr MaryAnn Lumsden. There were many lessons learned during this journey. For example, although collaborative regional programs have many attributes, they can be expensive and have been largely attended by people already well-schooled in the field. In contrast, IMPART has provided a far greater educational reach. Most recently, we have adapted IMPART to fit a workshop format that has been delivered to large groups of clinicians in Brazil, India, Russia and Costa Rica, many of whom are not expert in menopausal medicine. IMPART is now delivered through the IMS website in English and Spanish, and its uptake is increasing exponentially.
It is important to recognize that, as an international society, the IMS has much to offer other international organizations. We may not be a large society in terms of member numbers, but we are a major society with respect to having unique multi-disciplinary, multi-national expertise in a specialized field that at some point affects every woman who lives to midlife. To this end, one of my major goals during my presidency was to establish stronger relationships between the IMS and other leading organizations with shared interests. Part of the process was prioritizing the support of the four regional menopause societies: the Asia Pacific Menopause Federation (APMF), the North American Menopause Society (NAMS), the European Menopause and Andropause Society (EMAS) and the Federation of Latin American Menopause Societies (FLASCYM). In 2019, the IMS provided travel bursaries to support young people to attend each of these societies’ congresses, and there was an IMS-supported symposium held at each congress, including an IMPART workshop at FLASCYM. Another part of this process was looking beyond the world of menopause to cement the status of the IMS amongst other leading societies with interests in women’s health. In 2019, on behalf of the IMS, I signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the International Society of Endocrinology, which has resulted in shared webinars and other shared outputs. We have had IMS symposia at other Congresses, such as in Cape Town (with the International Society of Endocrinology, 2018), Dubai (with the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, 2018), Kolkata (National Conference of the Indian Menopause Society, 2019) and we hope to hold another IMPART workshop at FIGO (International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics) in 2021.
The IMS has specific expertise that ideally positions it to take a leadership role in the development of internationally applicable clinical care guidelines. These have included past global position statements and, more recently, the IMS-led Consensus Position Statement on Testosterone for Women (2019). I believe it is vital that the IMS maintains this leadership momentum. This is not simply to maintain the status of the IMS as an international society, but because the IMS is uniquely placed to bring together societies with diverse interests that impact women’s health to achieve harmonized recommendations.
Looking ahead, the IMS is in a strong position to continue to achieve its mission. We now have a Board election process that ensures global representation and a Board organizational structure with defined roles and responsibilities. There will always be debate as to how large our membership should be, but my belief is that what matters is the impact of the IMS, not the size of the Society. The IMS is a society of experts and health-care providers with specific interests in menopause-associated health and healthy aging, with global representations and global reach. As such, the IMS is well placed to work with other organizations to make its vision a reality: that all women across the world will have easy and equitable access to evidence-based knowledge and health care, empowering them to make fully informed mid-life health choices.