When I assumed PANLARs presidency, I gave the Executive Council a program that then seemed extremely ambitious. The goals for each PANLAR area were:

• In governance, give PANLAR a clear direction and get it thinking big and in the long term;
• In education, consolidating its own educational programs directed at the different types of members of the PANLAR community, rescuing our values and promoting them through new technologies. Likewise, fostering its own scientific and independent products through consensuses, the economic strengthening of the study groups, special programs and the redesigning of events and prizes in order to be competitive in a global rheumatology context;
• In communications, building a true PANLAR community with messages for each one of the current and potential groups. Particularly concerning patients, PANLAR’s identity and trademark was strengthened at all levels to create a sense of belonging and commitment with and for the organization; and, finally,
• In finance, achieve a PANLAR with greater financial sustainability, strengthening its existing products and diversifying the portfolio with new elements that would allow events to be held annually and to reduce them to simply one more source of income in the immediate future.

Today I can attest to the achievement of all the projects we put forward. Our accomplishments would have been impossible without the unwavering participation of the Executive Committee, the Executive Council, the study groups, the special groups, patients, administrative personnel, of the industry, especially its members whom directly supported several of these initiatives, and our families, which silently stand by us in this endeavor that leaves PANLAR stronger than ever.

However, allow me to speak about pending tasks for rheumatology as a specialty which, accounting for usual regional variations, exist in all the continents.

Musculoskeletal diseases affect 2 trillion people worldwide, many of them with degenerative arthrosis and soft tissue rheumatisms with treatments with poor results. Amidst this era of biologicals, unsatisfied needs affect 70% of patients and there exist clear inequalities in access to medicine and health services, to the teaching of rheumatology and the research of rheumatological diseases.

Although there is availability of this agents in almost all countries, in our continent only 10% of public system patients have access to the same and only half of the countries have some primary caregiving system for musculoskeletal diseases. Government programs are scarce and, to round out the picture, only 27% of medical schools in the continent teach some course in Rheumatology at the undergraduate level even though the number of patients we serve nears 12 million. For this huge task we have a total of approximately 11 thousand rheumatologists, of which 6 thousand are in Latin America. Too few, when considering that a third of them is present at this Congress.

From PANLAR we have tried to contribute to the solution of some of these situations, but I wish to highlight 3 programs today.

With Panlar Edu -the Monthly PANLAR Sessions program- we have reached more than a third of the continent’s rheumatologists. This free Medical Education program, initially in Spanish but which we expect to produce in Portuguese and subtitle in English, has received the highest accolades and has been imparted by rheumatologists from all over the continent. In this way we have improved the access to free, quality Medical Education in the continent.

The patient’s inclusion program allowed us to hold the First Pan-American Patients Congress which, with 500 people signed up and more than 300 attendees, evidences out commitment with allowing their knowledge and expertise to be considered in the fight against rheumatic diseases. Patients today are found in social media and that’s where we have made presence: with more than 25 thousand Facebook followers and accounts in all other networks, we have the world’s largest community and, more importantly, educational programs like “Hablemos de Lupus” (“Let’s Talk About Lupus”) and “Un Lugar Para la Artritis” (“A Place for Arthritis”). These programs were initiated in the region with ILAR grants and with PANLAR’s support have become worldwide benchmarks.

The REAL/PANLAR Excellency Centers Program is one of collective and inclusive construction, developed through consensus and adapted to the needs of the continent, as it accounts for its diversity and favors the continued improvement of caregiving centers. It has been reviewed by international peers through publications in specialized journals and is complemented by other forms of international accreditation, which is why it deserves to be supported by the international community interested in having a model for the treatment of these patients.

The aforementioned programs make us transcend the medical events’ scenario -in which, in any case, we achieved the international award for Best Medical and Association Congress for PANLAR ACCAR 2017- or the scientific scenario -in which we achieved our own consensuses for arthritis by Chikungunya and the use of Biosimilars- and contribute to solve with integrating solutions the problems of worldwide proportions that arise from a global vision of rheumatology.

We have fostered a culture of change and innovation that contributes to a Rheumatology that helps solve the problems we face daily in our countries and institutions, to the benefit of our patients, to whom, since the times of Van Breemen, Ruiz Moreno, Herrera Ramos and Pemberton, we swore to accompany in the fight against rheumatism “from its origins to its end.”

Thank you very much! We are all PANLAR!