Report from Vice President for Northern Europe
Dr. Elizabeth Lichtenstein MWIA Regional Vice President for Northern Europe
The Northern European Regional Meeting was held in Cambridge following the MWF annual meeting. In the historic surroundings of Cambridge, we had an interesting Saturday morning starting with a business meeting. Participating in our business meeting were representatives from Ireland, Sweden, United Kingdom, Finland and the Netherlands plus the president of MWIA Eleanor Nwadinobi. We also had visitors from Canada and Germany attending.
We started by determining what the role of a National Coordinator is. If anyone is not familiar with this there is a good job-description on the MWIA-website https://mwia.net/about-us/governance/ The role of a NC is basically to inform their country/organization about what is going on in MWIA and vice versa. This is where the importance of this newsletter comes in.
We had a good discussion on how to better involve our members. It all boiled down to the fact that, to be an attractive organisation we need to be active as members. MWIA is very much what we make it into. As we all are volunteers doing this in our spare-time we have to make sure that the outcome of the time we put in is valuable – both to us and to the world. We need to both react and act on the atrocities that are happening all over the world, in particular against women. As a “non-political” association we do not take sides in conflicts. However, we have to react when atrocities are committed specifically aimed at women all over the world.
We continued our meeting with presentations from the Northern European countries. Each country spoke for 5 minutes about what is going on in their country regarding VAWG, and work environment factors regarding women doctors. We learned a lot about parental leave in the Nordic countries and how VAWG is handled in different countries.
As of June 7th, MWIA has a new representative (Elizabeth Lichtenstein) on the board of the European Women´s Lobby which is the largest women’s organisation in Europe with over 2000 associations all over Europe and direct access to the EU (see separate report).
Fig 1. Front row L to R: Drs Sarah Fitzgibbon, Johanna Ajanki, Elizabeth Lichtenstein, Genevieve Koolhaas, Katie Bramall-Stainer. Back row: Nuthana Prathivardi Bhayankaram, Clarissa Fabre