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MINUTES OF THE RENAL PATHOLOGY SOCIETY BUSINESS MEETING The Renal Pathology Society (RPS) held a business meeting on Saturday evening, November 2, 2002 during the annual meeting of the ASN at the Philadelphia Marriott, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The meeting was called to order by Dr. Agnes Fogo, RPS President. Forty-nine members were in attendance. |
No formal report from the Research Committee.
Research Committee working on the renal biopsy manuscript and a second one dealing with the renal practice survey. Research committee also engaged in Dense Deposit Disease study & IRB issues. The Committee will coordinate giving information to RPS members examples of successful IRB applications.
RPS members will help organize a number of scientific activities. Dr. Fogo will attend meeting.
Meeting was concluded at 7:45 p.m.
Communications Committee
Helen Liapis, Kim Solez and Suzanne Meleg-Smith (chair), communicate by e-mail and telephonically to discuss ways and means to increase communication inside the RPS, and between RPS and other medical societies.
The achievements of the committee for the past year include:
The "RPS yellow pages": identification of the scientific interests of each RPS member by key words and a short narrative. The yellow pages are available on the RPS web-site, under membership. We are grateful to Helen for this great idea and to Brendan Doyle (Tulane Pathology administrative secretary) for the hard work. Actually, Brendan would like to work even more; he is requesting that all RPS members send in their data.
The "NEPHNPPT E-mail discussion group for renal pathology" was placed by Kim under the auspices of the RPS and is in use.
The RPS web-site has been a communication tool for the posting of consecutive, corrected "editions" of the collaborative paper on Renal Biopsy.
To increase RPS visibility, links have been established from other web-sites to ours.
The RPS web-site is continuously updated and shows memos, newsletters, opportunities
The web-site and E-mails to RPS members have been highly successful in disseminating information to the society as a whole.
Future plans: through the RPS web-site and e-mails, the Communications Committee will continue to support and help to disseminate information and to increase communication between members and between our society and others.
If submitted to Suzanne, slides from biopsy presentations by RPS members at various meetings can be placed on the RPS web-site for pre-study by participants.
Renal Pathology Society Membership Committee
November 15, 2002
The Membership committee includes Dr. Glen Markowitz, Dr. Maria Picken and Dr. Patrick Walker. This year we prepared a brochure for the RPS and made it available to the RPS members for distrubution.
These are the applications received for membership and emeritus status and approved at the ASN meeting of the RPS..
Membership applications:
Dr. Oyedele Adeyi
Emeritus status applications:
Dr. John C. Neff
Respectfully,
Patrick D. Walker, M.D.COMMITTEE REPORT - TRAINING PROGRAMS - NOVEMBER, 2002
Two major points were reported at the RPS business meeting at the ASN in Philadelphia:
1) Following consensus discussion at the RPS meeting at the USCAP in March, 2002, in which the membership approved in principle moving toward ACGME accreditation for our training programs, Dr. Racusen submitted an application for recognition of the Johns Hopkins Training program in Renal Pathology, category Selective Pathology, to the ACGME. Happily, the program was approved for accreditation, arguably an important first step in recognition of our specialty within pathology. She has since forwarded a copy of that application and contact information for the ACGME and Dr. Steve Nestler to all program directors, as well as several other members considering development of such a program. Hopefully, all training programs will pursue this track, convincing the ACGME that we have a critical mass of interest and commitment in this specialty area. This process is discrete from Board Certification, which we may choose to revisit as an issue in the future.
2) A brief survey of training program directors revealed that 11 fellows are currently in training, 6 domestically trained in pathology and planning to remain in the US. Of these, 1 is research only, 5 are clinical, and 5 are research and clinical.
The committee is planning for the coming year to address the issue of need for trainees in renal pathology - how many openings will there be for renal pathologists over the next several years. We will be sending a survey to all directors of Anatomic Pathology to solicit this information.
Yearly report 2002
Members: Finn Reinolt, Isaac StilIman, Jan Bruijn (chairman)
- Renal week PGEcourse in Renal Pathology by Agnes Fogo and Jan Bruijn will take place this year again with an updated and slightly revised program, with Charlie Alpers as a guest speaker. The case-oriented approach has been extended with help of Fokko van der Woude. The committee has noticed a vast demand for courses on practical renal pathology. Similar courses involving RPS members have been set up in The Netherlands and Germany but clearly more should follow.
- Dr Stillman has been involved in efforts to improve the RPS website to make it more interactive in order to expand collaborative activities.
- Members of this committee have been involved in an RPS-sponsored international meeting on classification of Lupus Nephritis that took place in May 2002 in New York. The new classification will be published soon. Another paper based on a similar international meeting on classification of FSGS is currently being written.
- Members of this committee and the Research Committee have been involved in setting up the new IRPS Collaborative Study Group (RPSSG), an initiative by Patrick Walker. The first study (organized by Pat Walker) will be on dense deposit disease. Jan Bruijn has nominated Franco Ferrario (member of the RPS research committee) to be the coordinator for Europe. Further pathologists involved will be Noel in Paris and Waldherr in Heidelberg.
- The First European Nephropathology Workshop took place in May 2002 in Amsterdam, organized by Jan Bruijn and Fokko van der Woude with help of a number of RPS members. Focus was on the most common problems (selected topics in depth) encountered by practicing pathologists and clinicians in nephrology (as opposed to the practical 2-day courses mentioned above which cover practically all of renal pathology). More than 100 people from many different countries (from as far as Japan) attended. Plans are to organize a second workshop in 2003 sponsored by this committee.
- Dr Stillman and the committee have been discussing ways to increase renal pathology's profile among residents. Awaiting results from questionnaires and surveys? A best practices paper on The Renal Biopsy has been written by RPS members headed by Pat Walker and Steve Bonsib.
- The committee has noticed that the terms RPS and IRPS are now both in use. A definite choice should be made.
