IPNA Currents July/2019

August 23, 2023

Dear Colleagues, dear Friends, Summertime is coming for those living in the North, wintertime for those living in the South, but congress time will bring most of us together in Venice soon! The scientific committee has received more than 1,200 abstracts, and we will do our best to offer oral/poster presentation to all those who made such an effort to participate, since we all know how different it can be between Harvard, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Katmandu, Sydney, and Madagascar!

In this Newsletter, you will also discover the updated impact factor of our journal Pediatric Nephrology, the progress of our international registry, an update on teaching courses, the project of an 8^th edition for our textbook, and the announcement of the 2019 winners of the Sister Centre Program.

In Venice, many councilors will reach their term, including me, and Kim Yap will start her presidency with all our support and best wishes!

See you soon in the City of Doges…

All my best, Pierre Cochat IPNA President

Excellent results from the call for the abstract submissions! A record of 1,281 abstracts were received from all over the world. Many thanks to all submitters for their participation.
The updated version of the program has been published and is now on the Congress website
A lecture from Prof. Raj Thakker on “Genetic approaches to metabolic bone disease in children” will open the Congress scientific sessions.
Prof. Frederick Kaskel, IPNA‘s History and Archive Committee Chair, will also share the results of our 2-year IPNA history project during the welcome ceremony.
Many former IPNA fellows will attend the Congress and the fellowship meeting on the morning of October 21.
The 3rd IPNA-ESPN Master for Junior Classes will take place on October 15-16 in Venice, just before the Congress itself. See the full announcement and scientific program. Deadline to register is on July 10th.

A new page has been created on the IPNA website called “Other Educational Resources”. It is accessible to members only, under Resources menu, and its aim is to link these resources on the IPNA website as means to provide quality improvement education to all of our membership (and especially those sites in resource-poor regions of the world). It will gather the various materials and links that can be useful for you.
For now, you can browse the new SCOPE Quality Improvement tutorials that are available on the SCOPE public site.

News from IPNA Council

We are happy to announce the new African Pediatric Nephrology Association (AfPNA) President: Prof. Hesham Safouh. Based in Egypt, Prof. Safouh is currently the IPNA councilor and will take over the presidency from Prof. Mignon McCulloch in October during the IPNA Congress.

“For me this is a great responsibility, especially when it comes in the footsteps of a leader like Mignon. With your support, advice, and cooperation I am sure we can achieve many goals together for our great continent, Africa, in the fields of improved patient care, and towards empowering pediatric nephrology physicians and nurses” says prof. Safouh shortly after the results announcement.

Since IPNA Councilors have six-year terms, a portion of the IPNA council rotates every three years, with the rotation occurring at the time of the triennial IPNA Congresses. We are very pleased to introduce five of the new Councilors to you in this newsletter issue. With their enthusiasm and new ideas, we are sure they will make valuable contributions to IPNA Governance. All of the incoming Councilors were asked the same series of questions and you can read the full article here.

IPNA MEMBERS…

Have you completed our Patient Education surveys?

Have you passed them on to your patients and their families?

We have been collecting Patient Education Information on our website.

Please give us feedback on this site by filling in our quick survey; see the link below. A very brief survey is also available (link below) for patients/families. Please pass this on and request their participation and suggestions for improving this site. Please send us any patient information materials in local languages and any further ideas and that you would like to share at [email protected]

Thank you very much for your cooperation and improving the great care of little kidneys.

Drs. Arvind Bagga, Francesco Emma, Stuart Goldstein, Carl Bates, and Rukshana Shroff, editors of the next edition of Pediatric Nephrology, have started to plan the text. You can look forward to a completely new format. Photos from their recent meeting are below:

Great news! Pediatric Nephrology impact factor rises to 2.816

Each year, all medical/scientific journals are assigned an updated impact factor by Clarivate Analytics. The journal impact factor is calculated based on the number of times articles published in a journal over the preceding 2 years have been cited that year. Pediatric Nephrology’s impact factor, which had dropped a bit in 2015, has been steadily increasing since then, reaching 2.816 in 2018.

Compared to other journals, Pediatric Nephrology is ranked #24 out of 80 ranked journals in the Nephrology-Urology category, and #19 out of 123 ranked journals in the Pediatrics category (includes both general pediatric and pediatric subspecialty journals). Analysis of Pediatric Nephrology’s impact factor has shown that it is heavily influenced by citations of the Reviews and Educational Reviews, followed by original articles. The increased impact factor reflects the hard work of the journal’s editors Drs. Michel Baum and Lesley Rees, along with the Associate Editors for Reviews and Educational Reviews. Congratulations to all on this accomplishment, and especially to Drs. Baum and Rees for their strong leadership of the journal.

Dear Members,

Summer in IPNA will be one big wave of IPNA teaching courses! Belize, Madagascar, Bhutan, Brazil and two courses in India. Thank you to all of the organizers for the hard work contributed to preparation and for educating so many physicians and health care workers about little kidneys in the areas where great care of little kidneys is needed most.

It was my pleasure to be one of the speakers at the IPNA teaching course in Krasnoyarsk (Siberia) in Russia. Siberia is a poor region with over 18 million people and only a few pediatric nephrologists. Julia Mazur from Krasnoyarsk is one of them and she did a brilliant job in organizing the course focused on modern problems in pediatric nephrology. The more that 100 clinicians who attended the course were very engaged in the presentations and the extended Q & A sessions and we know the impact for them will be very significant

I am very happy to see the growing number of the IPNA Teaching Courses organized in developing regions (we just approved courses in Bhutan and Mongolia), and I would like to encourage everyone to apply as there is some budget left for the courses in 2019. Follow this link for more information – http://www.ipna-online.org/content/teaching-courses.

John Mahan
Chair, Teaching Courses Committee

The 2^nd IPNA Teaching Course in Jordan – Teaching Report by Dr. Reham Almardini

The IPNA Registry aims to answer the following questions:

• How many children with end-stage kidney disease are offered dialysis and transplantation around the globe?
• How do the outcomes of these treatments compare in different regions of the world?

IPNA is the first pediatric subspecialist community to build a global database capturing ALL children living with a chronic disease condition.

Currently, the Registry oversees 59 countries representing two thirds of the global childhood population. 23,000 children on chronic renal replacement therapy are followed in these countries.

Data are either transferred from existing national registries or entered directly via an online platform developed by IPNA (www.ipna-registry.org).

To date, pediatric nephrologists in 20 countries are using the online platform to join the IPNA registry and at the same time establish their own national RRT registry.

To join this unique global initiative, please contact [email protected]

Franz Schaefer
Registry Committee Chair

Do you have any interesting news in the field of pediatric nephrology? Have you participated in an IPNA Teaching course, are you doing the fellowship programme or have you recently visited an interesting workshop or congress? Write to Lucie from the IPNA Office at [email protected]

IPNA Administrative Office

E-mail: [email protected]
Address: C-IN, 5.kvetna 65, Prague Congress Centre, 140 21, Prague 4, Czech Republic