Looking back on the 23rd Annual Meeting 2017

Looking back on the 23rd Annual Meeting in Zagreb, by Soemitro Poerbodipoero.

“The welcoming of the team in Croatia as well as the engagement of the entire ENOTHE board and office were great. The keynotes and the workshop were very interesting as well. Thanks for such an event with very high quality”.

“I really enjoyed the wide perspective of the presentations”.

“Structure and balance of the content of the days were good”.

“Fantastic annual meeting, I enrich my work as a lecturer”.

“Students got their podium with SPOTeurope”.

“Really nice meeting, first time as a student but it was great”.

“The Food was sooooo good!”.

To good to be true?

Maybe… participants of ENOTHE’s 23rd Annual Meeting in Zagreb, Croatia were also critical towards the use of social media, suggesting a programme strictly for posters and also suggesting better Professional Mentor-ship for the professionals who attended the for the first time. But overall literally a very good evaluation of the meeting as ENOTHE’s Annual Meeting is supposed to be. 

After a warm welcome address by our host, Saša Radić, President of the Croatian Association of Occupational Therapists, participants were also welcomed by the deputy of the Mayor of Zagreb.

The first keynote from a client perspective by Dr Ivan Sosa started with narrating the meaningfulness of OT in the daily life a of stroke survivor. After that a global tone was set by the keynote of Susanne Guidetti pushing us to integrating global and intercultural dimensions into the delivery of higher education in OT. The progress of the different ENOTHE working groups ICC@home, Social transformation and Citizenship were also very much appreciated by the audience. We look forward to their results in next annual meeting. The OT-EU group ‘OT working with displaced persons’, ROTOS and SPOT-Europe also presented impressive progress at the end of the meeting.

Inspirated by the core business in OT: Doing we were taught a powerful way of learning by the Keynote of Marleen van Doesburg-Kaijen. Claire Craig very nicely touched upon the opportunities and threats of digital technologies to promote health and wellbeing. And after emerging ourselves in the General Assembly, workshops, poster sessions, the receptions, dancing, music and social dinner, the Hanneke van Bruggen Lecture by Mieke le Granse contributed to what we hopefully can continue in a sustainable ENOTHE future: Change and a “Can Do” attitude!

See you all next year in Portugal!

On behalf of the ENOTHE board,
Soemitro Poerbodipoero