News

Stipend Call 2023: Financial Support to Attend the 2023 World Pharmacy Congress

This year’s FIP World Pharmacy Congress will take place from the 24th – 28th September in Brisbane, Australia. Like each year, the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) Health and Medicines Information Section offers a stipend to financially support a pharmacist or pharmacy student living or working in a low or middle income country to attend the FIP World Congress. The maximum support for one recipient is 1000 Euros. Preference is given to first-time attendees to the Congress.

Detailed information including the conditions and application requirements can be found in the Stipend Application Form.

The deadline for applying for the 2023 Stipend is the 1st May 2023.

About us and our objectives

HaMIS endeavours to offer:

• A forum to share knowledge about information issues relating to pharmacy, medicines, medical conditions and health, including public health;
• Avenues for networking between groups providing information and information services to patients and health care professionals;
• Avenues for networking between groups conducting research related to health and medicines information; and
• Opportunities to enhance public health and the work of the pharmacy profession through information programmes and related initiatives.

Health and medicines information underpins pharmacy practice across all disciplines. Areas of interest include:

• Strategic development of medicines information;
• Pharmacists as health and medicines information experts;
• Information needs of health care professionals, patients and consumers; 
• Development, dissemination, and use of health and medicines information to help optimise patient care, pharmaceutical care and public health;
• Patient empowerment;
• Health and medicines information as a tool to improve medication adherence;
• Health literacy;
• Development of health information technology and information delivery;
• Novel formats of health care communication, inclusive of social media, mHealth, Internet resources and other electronic resources;
• Writing and publishing health and medicines information resources;
• Medicine and poisons information services;
• Pharmacovigilance efforts;
• Global access to health care information;
• Medicines formulary information development; and
• Advertising and promotion of medicines.

How we work

Every four years, officers of FIP’s Health and Medicines Information Section (HaMIS) are elected. They include a President, Secretary and Treasurer.The Executive Committee consists of these three officers, the Immediate Past President, and three to six Section members elected to provide geographical balance. The current Executive Committee (2020-2024) comprises the following members:

President		Boyan Todorov  (Switzerland)
Secretary		Bidhata Khatri  (India)
Treasurer		Froukje Harkes-Idzinga  (Netherlands)
Representative for Africa/Middle East		Luna El Bizri  (Lebanon)
Representative for the Americas		Amy Kruger Howard  (USA)
Representative for Asia/Pacific		Vivien Tong  (Australia)
Representative for Europe	Position remains vacant
Immediate Past President		Parisa Aslani  (Australia)
IPSF Representative		João Guedes
YPG Representative		Renly Lim

In addition to these positions, there are two Representative-at-Large positions, which do not necessarily represent a certain region of the world. Both positions are currently vacant.

The current statutes of the Health and Medicines Information Section were adopted by the FIP Council in 2014. Click to download the HaMIS statutes in PDF format.

HaMIS activities

More information on HaMIS activities is available here.

Annual report

The HaMIS annual report is available here.