Meeting your high expectations

Abstract

These are exciting times for our association, as it consolidates the transition from a simpler volunteer organization to a more complex one with a professional workforce. The CUA has gone from an entity whose main role was organizing the Annual Meeting, to one with many year-round initiatives. These include the Office of Education (OE), CUAJ, the patient brochure initiative and our guidelines. The complexity and cost of the organization has increased substantially. This reflects the increasing maturity of the CUA and the higher expectations of its members. Growth creates opportunities and challenges. The opportunities are obvious. The OE resoundingly establishes the CUA as an organizer of continuing medical education activities year-round. CUAJ is a wonderful initiative, of which we should all be proud, and has tremendous upside potential. The patient information brochures have had a huge and positive impact on patient education. The challenges relate primarily to the future. Where are we going, and what kind of organization do we want to become? What services should we focus on? What kind of annual meeting serves our members the best? Should we increase our political activities (as the AUA has done) at the federal level? What direction should the OE take? What can we do to make us more attractive to Canadian urologists (there are about 150 nonmembers in Canada)? How can we increase our visibility to the medical profession and the public? What about our financial stability? Remarkably, there is no record of the CUA ever going through a formal strategic planning process to address these questions in a systematic way. To that end, we are planning to do this with the CUA executive this year. We have engaged a strategic planning consultant to assist in this process. Over the next few months a series of interviews will be carried out with the current, past and future CUA leadership, as well as with many members of the executive. Questionnaires will be sent out to many members. This process will aim to gather diverse perspectives. The process will culminate in a full-day retreat just before the CUA executive meeting in January, followed by a formal report. We hope that this document will serve as a road map for the next 5 years, and will contribute to the development of a mature and healthy CUA that meets its members’ needs in many domains, including education, practice support, manpower planning and publication. Some members have expressed justifiable concern about the growth of the central office and the increased costs involved. Members are likely aware that the CUA shares offices and personnel with the Societe Internationale d’Urologie (SIU). Your executive has exercised a great deal of due diligence in evaluating the performance of the central office and establishing a sound cost-shared arrangement for the future. We are very satisfied that the current arrangement is reasonable and fair. We benefit tremendously from the experience and diverse talents of the CUA staff and have been able to leverage the lessons they learned from managing the SIU.