The Annual General Meeting (AGM) is the most important gathering of allergy, and airways diseases’ patient leaders who share EFA goals. The 2018 AGM brought together 38 leaders from 18 countries to decide on governance and to share best practices between themselves and throughout EFA thematic working group sessions. The AGM scrutinised and approved EFA’s work plan and budget for next year, as well as the annual accounts and report from 2017. The event was cordially hosted in Lisbon by our Portuguese members, APA and RESPIRA, who ensured the participation of the leader of the Portuguese national programme on respiratory diseases. Guests from EFA’s medical society partners, the primary care (the IPCRG), allergologists (the EAACI) and pulmonologists (the ERS), as well as the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine and experts on ethics and digital care joined us in the meeting to share with us the latest advances in personalised care.
We welcomed new leadership and Members
The AGM welcomed a new Board Member, Ilkka Repo, CEO of the Finnish Allergy, Skin and Asthma Federation, who brings with him economic, strategic and leadership background. We send special thanks to Carlos Nunes from APA, who served as Secretary of Board from 2016-2018.
EFA welcomed one new member to our 42 associations, the French Eczema Association, focused on raising awareness and patient education on atopic eczema, expanding our actions to represent the needs of atopic eczema patients, special category in allergy. We also received two applications from recently created associations: Turkish COPD Association and Allergienet from Belgium. Since they do not fully meet our membership criteria yet, they attended our AGM as observers.
New EFA policies
In 2018, we adopted a Memorandum of Understanding with EAACI establishing strong and long-term partnership with this organization with whom we share high level information and objectives and work very closely in joint projects like the European Parliament Interest Group on Allergy and Asthma.
We also adopted a new privacy and cookies policy compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation which safeguards the privacy of those that sign up to support EFA, especially when sensitive information is required.
We launched a membership survey in 2018 that was completed by 1 out of 3 Members. The survey will help establishing evidence on who exactly we represent; the disease focus on our Members, their capacity and representativeness. We will then update our Membership Strategy.