Face to Face meeting of IMAGINE HMB in Ireland

Our EU-Funded İMAGİNE-HMB Project had its second face-to-face meeting in Ireland, Dublin, Maynooth in the beginning of this week.

This time we have become even a bigger family with the partecipation of all Consortium Partners: EMBA (the Project Coordinator), INHA (Irish Neonatal Health Alliance, the local organizer), AEBLH (the Spanish Association of Human Milk Banks), FMBI (the German Human Milk Bank Initiative) & HMBF (the Polish Human Milk Bank Foundation); our Expert Forum members; and the Irish guests.

It has been 2 fruitful days of intense collaborative work. The first day was intentionally planned to coincide with the Human Milk Donation Day.

As the local organizer and the Coordinator of the INHA team Assoc. Prof Tanya Cassidy opened the meeting with a nice introduction. Then Prof. Sertac Arslanoglu, the Coordinator of the IMAGINE-HMB Project and President of EMBA, gave a great 45-min presentation on the story of EU SoHO regulation, the involvement of donor human milk, and the progress of the Project.

After the Coffee-Break we had our Workshop. Paolo Satta and Laura Cavallarin from the Project Management Team conducted it successfully distributing to all of us a SWOT Analysis test to identify strengths, weaknesses, oppportunities, and threats of the regulation on milk banking. We had a lively discussion and had new insights.

In the afternoon and the second day Expert Forum worked on the comparison of the 14 Guidelines the Consortium handed over to them, and had consensus on which points to include in the guidelines and which points to be sent for Delphi Consensus.

The second day we had our Steering Committee Meeting as well discussing about reporting (presented by Paolo Satta) WP training (presented by Nadia Garcia) and a frame for Guideline drafting (presented by Daniel Klotz and German team).

It was a wonderful and great meeting inspiring us for new ideas and production.

Heartfelt thanks to the INHA team for the great hospitality and organization and to each one of our team members and our distinguished experts for the great work realized