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ECNP and the future
It was such a great pleasure to see so many of you at the 34th ECNP Congress Hybrid in Lisbon, Portugal! Almost 5,000 participants had registered, and about half of the participants chose to come in person to this, the first large post-Covid-19 pandemic international congress in our field. It was wonderful to sense the vibrant atmosphere at the congress and to greet international colleagues face to face after being online for more than a year and a half. I have also received many messages from online participants that they were pleased with how professionally the sessions were broadcast, both content-wise and technically. Let me remind you that all online content is freely available to registered congress participants until 13 January 2022.
Planning in such a constantly changing environment was a challenging task and once again, I want to give a huge thanks to the ECNP staff who worked tirelessly and determinedly to make both the physical and the online parts of the meeting a success. Also, thanks to the many speakers who remained committed to coming and to those who stepped in to make sure that the programme was as little as possible affected by late cancellations.
But we cannot afford to rest on our success when we have several potentially disruptive challenges in front of us. For example, the way we meet at congresses is likely to change more permanently, not the least because of the growing concern about the climate crisis and carbon footprint. We believe that the ‘hybrid’ congress model is here to stay and it will also enable a much wider international outreach. This will not only require substantial re-thinking and investment, but it is also something which we want to discuss with our sister colleges and other partner organisations. Teaching and training will continue to be done face to face, but online teaching is a powerful tool with a potentially much larger outreach. ECNP Networks and Fellows constitute a highly skilled group of clinicians and scientists within our field and they will be instrumental in disseminating knowledge and training. ECNP has already come some way in terms of online training, but so much more can be done.
As a consequence, the ECNP executive committee has taken several steps to prepare as well as possible for the future. The executive committee has formed an Innovation Task Force, where all these and many more aspects will be dealt with. We have also established a Sustainability Task Force to ensure that ECNP behaves ecologically responsible.
Finally, if you find these aspects interesting and would like to contribute to the continued development of ECNP, I want to take the opportunity to encourage you to be nominated (or self-nominate) as potential member of the ECNP Executive Committee.
Gitte Moos Knudsen
ECNP President
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