I was pleased to co-chair the 2010 annual Scientific meeting of the CAGP in Toronto along with Dr. Zahinoor Ismail, who is the director of CME for the division of Geriatric Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Working together with Drs. Rhaberu, Smart, and Desautels of the CAGP board, and with Dr. Benoit Mulsant of the University of Toronto, we were able to assemble a program to appeal to our national group of psychiatrists as well as family doctors and other allied health professionals with an interest in seniors’ mental health.

The theme of this year’s program was “From Prevention to Palliation”. The keynote address and one workshop focused on palliative approaches to dementia. There were plenary sessions on antipsychotics and behavioural treatments for dementia, and the other workshops concerning a variety of topics including treatment-resistant depression, sexuality, schizophrenia, psychopharmacology and ethics.

Education was an important theme at this year’s workshop with a lunchtime invited session for education leaders, and a workshop on the progress towards subspecialization. We also for the first time made the handout materials for all sessions available online, free for attendees and CAGP members.

We had 189 registrants at this year’s meeting, of which 54% were physicians, 27% other allied health professionals and 11% residents/students. The total numbers were 52% higher than last year.

There were 33 organizations represented at the meeting, and from the information collected at the time of registration it is clear that word-of-mouth and colleague recommendations were the most successful ways of communicating the meeting. So a big thank you to all those that helped spread the word! My colleagues and I prepared summaries of the sessions for this newsletter.

Mark Rapoport, MD, FRCPC