Dear Colleagues:
Technologic advances and scientific breakthroughs have enabled great advances in the care of the pregnant, fetal, and neonatal patients we care for. Within one generation, obstetrical care has been transformed by ultrasound visualization, the ability to safely perform intrauterine procedures, perinatal transport, steroid administration to enhance fetal lung maturity and protocols to enhance patient safety. Neonatal care has progressed at even a faster pace due to dramatic improvements in respirators, great knowledge about drug pharmacodynamics and the ability to push the frontier of perinatal viability.
These advances represent perinatology at its best with obstetricians and pediatricians working together as a perinatal team with a wide range of professionals including midwives, nurses, geneticists, imaging technicians, laboratory experts, neurologists and physiologists and others, all with the common goal of improving maternal-fetal and neonatal care, which would be difficult to achieve without this interdisciplinary group perspective.
To meet these objectives worldwide has been a major objective of our Socitey through biannual congresses and meetings, educational courses many of them assisted by our affiliated societies. Our official Journal, The Journal of Perinatal Medicine offers a venue for scientific publications and the diffusion of consensus guidelines. This worldwide vision requires that the WAPM keep in mind developing countries with conferences and special courses as well as an endorsement of the Matress Mundi which tries to address some of the most pressing problems in these countries.
This Society, thanks to the skills, honesty and intelligence of those who have hitherto governed it, preserves intact the values that characterize our Society and which have been the basis of the trajectory followed. The new Board members are going to maintain and respect the established Society’s goals adapting to the changing needs of the World.
Our Society has a clear mission:
1. To be one of the leading Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine Societies in the world.
2. To respect the academicians that have devoted so much effort in the scientific progress of the Society.
3. To continue and to extend the teaching and academic development.
4. To develop clinical guidelines and recommendations.
5. To be a springboard for young professionals who are the new academic force and who need platforms to show their capacities.
6. To collaborate with all Societies on common goals to improve maternal and infant health.
7. To help developing countries to improve perinatal care.
8. To respect and earn to be respected.
Our Society is aimed to become an instrument uniting all professionals related to Perinatology , helping to build bridges of dialogue in a world so diverse in knowledge, opportunities and economic possibilities. Joining the WAPM and working with the WAPM means to play an important role to this constant and evolving effort to ever improve the care and quality of life of mothers and children throughout the world. I challenge you to join us in the quest for the healthier World.
Xavier Carbonell-Estrany, MD, PhD
President of WAPM