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PAMSA Regional Meeting - A Success!

The ninth PAMSA regional meeting was held from 5th-7th January, 2005 in Panama City, Panama. Over 30 delegates from 9 countries attended the event, alongside another 15 people from the team of officials and over 40 members from IFMSA-Panama, the organizing NMO. The theme of the conference was "Connecting our NMOs: Better, Stronger, Health-Focused", which proved to be a huge success.

Several workshops were run, including one on Mental Health and one on Sexual and Reproductive Health, with guest speakers, such as Dr. Mazzoti from Peru and Dr. Montalvan, who ran the sexual and reproductive health workshop. There were also brief regional SCOPE and SCOME sessions held by their respective SC directors and PAMSA sessions which focused on the development of the region as a whole.

The unofficial side of the conference, the night celebrations, were wild and filled with lots of seco and Soberana beer. IFMSA-Panama took good care of all of us and provided quite an experience. Many will agree that the Hotel Marparaiso was completely caught off-guard with the number of people attended, yet the minor problems were soon resolved.

The ninth PAMSA regional meeting attendants

All in all, it was a great experience for the Americas as our first regional meeting outside of a GA and there are hopes that this will occur every two years. Many thanks to IFMSA-Panama and the Universidad Latina de Panama for all their support and special thanks to our friend, and now retired, NMO president Dr. Anthony Imudia from IFMSA-Panama for his role in the organization of this fantastic conference.

Lawrence Loh
Regional Co-ordinator for the Americas
rcamerica-at-ifmsa.org