As the new incoming Heart Failure Association President I wish to state very clearly that working for the Association is an honour and privilege. However, I see it as a great challenge as I strive to sustain all the successes the Association has already achieved over recent years. We are rapidly growing, we already have 3,600 members and together with my friends and colleagues from the Board, Committees and Study Groups, we will do our best to maintain strong membership value.
I am very happy to see a broad interest in participating in the activities of HFA. This year we were pleased to receive 75 outstanding applications for the HFA Board membership. It was an extremely difficult decision and after much discussion we finally selected 8 new Members of the Board whom I wish to welcome.
Among our numerous on-going activities/projects, I believe the following deserve to be briefly mentioned:
• On-line education: We will focus on using the website platform to make education more attractive, up-to-date, and able to address relevant problems, ensuring attention is being paid towards all health care providers dealing with heart failure patients.
• "Traditional education” will continue with several courses organised at the Heart House, workshops and consensus documents written by the Committees, and the Study Groups on Clinical Trials, Standards of Care, Acute Heart Failure, Exercise Training, Peripartum Cardiomyopathy, and Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction.
• New language versions of our patient-website: heartfailurematters.org. Only recently a Russian version has been developed which will sit alongside our existing English, German, French and Spanish versions. It is becoming more and more popular worldwide and the number of visits to the site continues to increase.
• European Heart Failure Awareness Day with the contribution of more than 20 European Countries: It was a great success and went a long way towards creating awareness of the epidemic that is heart failure, on our continent. In addition it demonstrated what HFA considers as its top priority, its close partnership with the National Heart Failure Societies in Europe, there is no doubt, we will continue next year.
• A Successful Winter Translational Research Meeting: always taking place in January this event has become a unique place for scientists of exceptional standing to meet clinicians and further discuss in a very friendly and informal atmosphere, the future of the translational research into heart failure. We are proud to have it as a structural element of HFA activities, and we will support its work to ensure it is the best such event in the world.
• Further growth of our flagship journal: European Journal of Heart Failure; under the leadership of Dirk van Veldhuisen the journal is aiming to increase impact factor (already reaching 3.706 this year – congratulations to Dirk van Veldhuisen and Karl Swedberg previous Editor-in-Chief) and to extend the readership beyond Europe.
In the future we will aim to do our best to continue all the successful on-going projects, in order to promote "The HFA Brand”.
Obviously, we have plans to enhance our activity and to achieve our mission we will try to narrow the gap between the guidelines and everyday clinical practice in all European countries. We plan to strengthen our collaboration with other ESC Associations and expand the interest in heart failure within industry partnerships and we will endeavour to start thinking more globally and explore the other continents.
To accomplish all these ambitious goals we need the continuous support of all the Members of our HFA. Therefore, it is my obligation and honour to ask all of you for your continuing support.
At a recent Board meeting it was said that the HFA President has to be a very cautious listener and a very delicate moderator. I fully share this view and I am looking forward to a challenging and exciting 2 years with all of you.
Prof. Piotr Ponikowski
President of the Heart Failure Association of the ESC