Athens 2024: Thank you!
Thank you to our delegates, speakers and sponsors
The IPCRG was delighted to host our 12th World Conference in Athens, Greece, from 9-11 May 2024 - thank you to everyone who attended, presented, contributed to and made it a success. With almost 400 delegates, 12 main and plenary sessions, 61 oral presentations, 25 conversation cafés, 74 posters, 8 workshops, a leadership track, numerous discussions and a smooth execution we are delighted that the conference provided a vital moment to come together as a global community of practice and respiratory research to learn from each other.
The theme of the conference was Creating Change, a challenge those in primary care and academia are very familiar with. It provided a fantastic opportunity to learn new skills, share experience of different settings, and appreciate the many wonderful resources that IPCRG and our national members can offer. The IPCRG conference is the key place for global primary care leaders, emerging leaders and early adopters to meet to network, gain new clinical skills and to be inspired about how to introduce/scale up and spread the initiatives in their own countries. A mix of family and integrated care physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and allied healthcare professionals and students and patient representatives attended.
The research on display was unique to IPCRG: real primary care respiratory questions and solutions engaging with our real life populations. The exhibition was vibrant and provided opportunities to collect resources that were showcased during the meeting - for example, our Desktop Helpers and Asthma Right Care and COPD Right Care resources.
The Scientific Programme Committee, ably steered by Prof Ioanna Tsiligianni, provided a varied programme of skills-based workshops, plenary sessions, oral abstract sessions, conversation cafés and poster sessions. Our speakers presented on topics and issues relevant to countries of all income levels, including planetary health, asthma, allergy, COPD, respiratory infections and symptoms such as breathlessness and cough as well as hot topics in primary respiratory care including the latest updates from GINA and GOLD. In addition, in response to the strategic objective set by the IPCRG Board to develop leadership capacity in our field, a leadership track was held for the first time. The meeting was preceded by the inaugural Spirometry Simplified masterclass - a leading initiative by IPCRG that seeks to empower primary care clinicians worldwide by promoting the widespread and equitable adoption of spirometry.
In line with our commitment to the triple bottom line in global primary care, we held two well-received sessions on planetary health. The first, chaired by Tiago Maricoto and Despo Ierodiakonou, saw Andrée Rochfort and Mayara Floss present on environmental threats to respiratory health, how these particularly affect vulnerable populations and regions, and examine strategies and initiatives for sustainable healthcare - such as the Irish College of GPs’ Glas Toolkit. The subsequent session on greening your practice and community guided delegates to identify areas within their current practices where green initiatives can be implemented and waste reduced, culminating in the symbolic planting of a tree on the conference centre grounds.
We hosted two sessions on breathlessness - a plenary expanding on the background to our new Desktop Helper, and a workshop that offered practical interventions for primary care use structured around breathing, thinking and functioning.
Our session ‘hot topics in primary respiratory care’ saw updates from Ayşe Arzu Yorgancıoğlu and Sundeep Salvi on the latest updates and debates in GINA and GOLD. Ioanna Tsiligianni welcomed the new guidelines, but made an impassioned argument that primary care requires complementary approaches and outlined how disease-specific guidelines can fall short of primary care’s needs - citing topics such as frailty, multimorbidity and public health which are important to primary care but receive little mention in GOLD or GINA.
Our World Conferences are often the starting point for developing relationships and kickstarting new initiatives. Following on from our successful conference session, IPCRG and ARIA are putting together a joint working party to develop a pocket guide on allergic rhinitis and asthma - so please projectsupport [at] ipcrg [dot] org (subject: IPCRG-ARIA%20pocket%20guide) (get in touch) if you are interested!
For day-by-day breakdowns of the programme, take a look at our news summaries for Thursday, Friday and Saturday and check the hashtag #IPCRGAthens2024 on social media to see what delegates had to say!
Abstracts
Thank you to all delegates who submitted abstracts - with 138 on display, a wealth of promising research was available for delegates to discuss. We are delighted to share our prize-winning abstracts - the authors have been awarded with free registration for the next IPCRG World Conference. Congratulations to Hilary and Sathia!
Ramya Kottapalli: Co-developing a qualitative study with expert patients to explore experiences of supported asthma self-management in the IMP²ART trial
Sathia Kanawathy: Development and content validation of a Chronic Cough Decision Support Tool (CC-DST) for Primary Care Doctors
Feedback
For attendees, there is still time to provide feedback by following the link to the evaluation form sent to you by Erasmus, after which your attendance certificate will be sent to you. We are pleased to announce that 97% of respondents to the Evaluation shared that they found the Conference either useful or extremely useful for their professional activity.
We had representation from 49 countries and 99% of respondents to the evaluation survey had either a very good or good impression of the conference and 98% having a good (3) or excellent (4) overall impression of the Scientific Programme. As many of those in attendance observed, there is a very collegiate atmosphere that builds confidence, forges relationships and creates new research and education ideas.
We would like to extend our thanks to all our sponsors. We greatly value your partnership, which contributes to further IPCRG's mission of a global population breathing and feeling well through universal access to right care.
IPCRG will continue to provide these opportunities to network and develop skills for the global respiratory primary care community, with the next date set for our Scientific Meeting in Brasov, Romania, 10-12 April 2025. It will focus on research and innovation and is likely to incorporate capacity building programmes as side-meetings.