• Reducing the number of directors for a coherent engaged board
• Bringing new skills on the board to increase our capacity, including: business, legal, educational, a community representative, a doctor in training and other non-doctor practitioners
• Changing the constitution so that the executive of the board can only be elected by the board after the AGM
• Getting very focused on our strategy with regular shorter board meetings
• Amazing and understandable financial reporting allowing all directors to fulfill their financial obligations for governance purposes
• And so many other changes small and large…..

•  To live our talk the AIMA board opened membership up to all appropriately qualified practitioners, with the notion that while individual practitioners can be integrative, Integrative Medicine is fundamentally about working in a team to accompanying each patient
• We have met with as many organisations and institutes in the IM sphere as we could and explored and organised many collaborative projects
• We conducted some community research with the Health Issues Centre on what people disclose to practitioners and doctors on their use of complementary/traditional medicines and supplements
• We started a legal advocacy group and now have early advice for doctors who have legal or regulatory challenges, the work in this area is ongoing
• We have done our best to support practitioners experiencing challenges, regulatory or otherwise
• We have represented IM in many forums including: senate enquiries, meetings with the health minister and numerous other politicians, meetings with Anne Tonkin (chair of the Medical Board of Australia), media interviews – print, online, radio and TV, at every IM conference and whenever possible in the community.
• We coordinated and led the response to the Australian Medical Board’s public consultation for ‘clearer regulation of medical practitioners who provide complementary and unconventional medicine and emerging treatments’.  It was a great moment for IM as all the organisations and individuals came together for our first really collaborative piece of work. This was very well supported by thousands of public submissions.  And we collectively WON!!
• We have developed a module on inter-professional communication that trains practitioners to write comprehensive letters to other practitioners for shared patients, this important piece of work not only helps to establish the IM team but ensures that each member is aware of the relevant information for patient care and safety – as many of our projects this module was contributed to by a very skilled group of practitioners and academics who developed the course along with the ground-breaking guidelines which underpin the course.
• We stopped running conferences in Australia for a time to focus on our long- term strategy as a conference takes most of our people resources leaving little left for building…. But conferences continued to run in Auckland run by our NZ team, led by the fabulous Dr Tim Ewer. These events bring the IM family together, we learn, share and have a wonderful reconnecting time each year.
• We have developed and nurtured relationships with NICM at Western Sydney University and the National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine at Southern Cross University and without pre-empting the announcement at the conference in Auckland this month, it has been a wonderful and fruitful exchange in so many ways.
• We are about to launch our Fellowship of Integrative Medicine with a grand parenting process to start this month (for doctors initially). The fellowship will be for all appropriately registered practitioners. The challenges for IM practice are most significant for doctors and this fellowship will not only define and make transparent the competencies and learning outcomes, it will be a systematic way of learning IM, providing a standard for IM doctors. All who complete this fellowship will be Certified Integrative Medicine Specialists. AIMA will communicate and explain this process and the learning outcome to regulatory bodies, the government, MDUs, the relevant colleges and the community, a huge step towards providing some rigor to the process and some safety for practitioners and their patients.

"Vitamin D Deficiency Linked to Death, New Study Finds

Vitamin D deficiency increases mortality risk and raising levels even slightly could decrease the risk, researchers examining data from the UK Biobank have found.

They used a Mendelian randomization approach, which uses genetic variants as "proxy indicators" for external factors that affect vitamin D levels, such as sun exposure or dietary intake. It allows for analysis of the relationship between deficiency and outcomes including mortality, which can't be done in randomized clinical trials for ethical reasons."

To read the full article in Medscape by Miriam E. Tucker click here, to read the findings which were published online October 24 in Annals of Internal Medicine click here.

"Long Sleep, Turning In Early May Up Risk for Dementia

Too much sleep and time in bed (TIB) may raise the risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer's disease (AD), new research suggests.
Results from a population-based study of almost 2000 older adults, all of whom were free of dementia at baseline, showed that risk for dementia was 69% higher in those who slept more than 8 hours daily vs 7 to 8 hours daily; and it was twice as high for those who went to bed before 9 PM vs at 10 PM or later.
These associations were most pronounced in people aged 60-74 years and in men, the researchers report."

To read the full article by Batya Swift Yasgur in Medscape, click here. To read the findings which published online on September 21 in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, click here.