Report to the IFMBE Administrative CouncilAd-Hoc Committee on IFMBE Representation in Europe1 Task and membership of the Committee In connection with the first EMBEC conference in Vienna last November, Professor Helmut Hutten as chairman of the IFMBE European WG organised a discussion meeting on do we need to take some action in Europe to improve European collaboration and co-operation within the medical and biological engineering community. The meeting was well attended and a lively discussion took place with various suggestions for the future. Based on this on 12 November 1999 IFMBE President Jean-Pierre Morucci appointed an ad-hoc committee to look into the needs of the European medical and biological engineering community and suggest solutions. While IFMBE undertook this initiative it was also very much aware that as a global, international federation it cannot decide what needs to be done in Europe, if anything. Such decisions must be made by Europeans, not by the IFMBE. By taking this initiative, however, IFMBE wants to provide a forum for these decisions to be discussed and worked on. The charge of the committee is to work out a proposal on how the IFMBE representation in Europe should be organised. The committee will work together with the members of the IFMBE European Working Group and the Administrative Council and also to include the European Member Societies and transnational societies, such as ESEM and EFOMP, in these discussions. A background document on this appeared in the November 1999 IFMBE News (http://ifmbe-news.iee.org/ifmbe-news/nov1999/medical.html). The membership of the committee is as follows:
2 Scope of work The task given to the ad-hoc committee was, by intention, loosely formulated. Therefore the first task of the committee has been to define in more detail what it is expected to do and achieve. In considering this the first decision was to define what is meant by medical and biological engineering (MBE). The definition that we adopted is the broad definition from the IFMBE strategic plan:
In Europe we have national medical and biological engineering societies in most European countries. We also have a number of trans-European societies in various sub-fields of medical and biological engineering. We have a large number of universities giving medical and biological engineering education and degrees. We have a lot of industries both large and SMEs. In medical physics and medical informatics there are European organisations (EFOMP and EFMI respectively). In USA getting the medical and biological engineering community united under the banner of AIMBE has been highly successful in attracting the attention of the federal government. In Europe we have not been very successful in approaching the European Commission. Today in the Fifth Framework Program for Research and Development, medical and biological engineering is represented very weakly. Therefore the questions that the committee is addressing are:
Initially the committee worked with virtual meetings using email. However, it became evident that in order to arrive at results the committee must meet face-to-face. Therefore a meeting took place in London on 4-6 March 2000. The President authorised the funding to cover travel costs. The timing and place was selected to minimise travel costs as three of the members attended the IFMBE FJC meeting in London on 6 March. This meeting produced an action plan which is currently being implemented. The action plan and the task/scope of the committee will be discussed in Chicago at the Administrative Council and also in a meeting with representatives of the European Member Societies. Additionally, the committee has planned a meeting after these to discuss, sum up and decide on future actions. 3 Action plan Seven action items have been identified. A brief description and status report of each of these is given below. 3.1 Accreditation of academic medical and biological engineering programs The European Union is pushing forward with the accreditation of academic programs. The Bologna declaration is motivated by 'job and student mobility in an open market' (http:www.unige.ch/cre/activities/Bologna%20Forum/bologna%20declaration.htm). Medical and biological engineering is one of the areas falling under this action. In relation to this the following terms were defined:
A surprisingly large number of European networks exist in the area of inter-university based academic medical and biological engineering education, thus enabling student mobility. These have been funded through a number of different mechanisms of the EU Commission (Socrates, Leonardo, Tempus, Human Capital, Marie Curie). Examples of these projects include:
The role of the IFMBE in this could be to provide co-ordination. The committee agreed on the following actions:
3.2 Relations with the EU Commission The current EU Framework Programme for Research and Development (in short FP), running from 1999–2003, does not have a medical and biological engineering program. Considering that this is the quickest growing area we should try to rectify this situation for the next FP (sixth in order). The preparation of this will start in early 2002, possibly late 2001. This was considered a high priority. To sound out the EU Commission a meeting took place in late March between some Commission officers and Dov Jaron and Jean-Pierre Morucci. The outcome of that meeting is reported below:
Additionally, in Europe the National Academies of Applied Sciences and Engineering have for several years now established a European Council with the acronym Euro-CASE (www.euro-case.org). Euro-CASE consults the EU Commission in various areas and e.g. manages the annual Information Society Technologies (IST) Prize process for the EU Commission. One of the French initiatives for their EU presidency period (July-December 2000) is focused on creating a European community of high-level experts in the various fields of technology. One of these fields could be medical and biological engineering. In order to influence the preparation process leading to the Sixth FP we need to identify and define a medical and biological engineering research and development plan and create the necessary arguments to get it included. To do this we need resources, both individuals and funding. The individuals should be identified amongst the European medical and biological engineering community (including industry). For funding we could apply for a grant from the EU Commission. The grant will be used to organise a series of cutting edge workshops on new emerging areas of medical and biological engineering where the next Framework Programme for Research and Development of the EU should focus. The purpose of these workshops is to:
The plan is to arrange 5 or 6 such workshops each with roughly 10-15 invited leading international experts and 30-40 additional participants. The workshops include formal presentations, group discussions and panels with concluding recommendations for action. Possible themes for the workshops include Biocomplexity, Bioinformatics, Biomaterials, Bionanotechnology, Biophotonics, Biosystems on nanoscale, Cellular and tissue engineering and Sensor technology.
These are tentative themes based on a list that NSF is currently considering for future action programmes. Background information on these NSF initiatives can be found at: www.itri.loyola.edu and specifically for nanotechnology at: www.itri.loyola.edu/nano/iwgn/worldwide.study. The challenge is to locate an agency inside the EU Commission which is interested and able to support the running of these workshops. Possibilities that have been identified so far are:
3.3 Clinical engineering in Europe There are three EU directives on medical devices. Additionally the Commission has developed some guideline documents and is in the process of developing some additional ones. Some countries (e.g. Austria and Germany) have added to the directives requirements on how medical devices must be utilised and maintained. On the other hand, currently there are no requirements for health care organisations on how to deploy or utilise the services of clinical engineers or on what kind of systems need to be installed for proper management and utilisation of medical devices in health care. IFMBE could take the lead in this and work with the relevant EU Commission agency to get them interested in the need to develop a requirement / guideline / directive on the use and maintenance of medical devices (technology management) in the format of a quality system or similar. Since this idea a decision has been taken to organise a discussion forum on how clinical engineering should be organised in Europe. This meeting takes place on 21 June in Würtzburg, Germany. Joachim Nagel, Peter Heimann and Andrei Issakov intend to attend the meeting. The background to this is that there already exist a number of regional clinical engineering organisations, like the AFTH (Africa) and ACCE (North America).
3.4 Capitalising on the ICSU membership We need to utilise the fact that through our successful acceptance to ICSU medical and biological engineering has been accepted by the international science community as a scientific discipline of its own identity. This means that through IUPESM we need to inform the respective National Academies of that fact and inquire how many medical and biological engineering specialists are elected members of these Academies and furthermore argue the case that our discipline should be included into the fields from which they elect / invite new members.
3.5 What is the appropriate organisational structure in Europe In the discussion at EMBEC in Vienna Helmut Hutten outlined a number of different organisational schemes. At that time it was agreed that it was too early to talk about organisation when there was no clear agreement what the tasks of that organisation will be. In the London meeting the organisation was discussed in a very preliminary way. The following points were made/touched upon:
3.6 European medical and biological engineering industry The London meeting did not discuss this issue in enough detail. It is clear that if we want to be successful towards the EU Commission we must have the support of European industries. It was pointed out that the EU Commission has an extensive SME program family. In USA the SBIR action of the NIH has been highly successful (www.nih.gov).
3.7 Engaging new people If we want the actions outlined above to be successful we must engage additional persons and get them involved in developing and implementing the actions. As a first step those present agreed to identify two persons each who can be characterised as representing the younger generation of biomedical engineers, preferably females. The names will be communicated to Niilo Saranummi by the end of March.
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