President's Page

Dear Members,

As the global experts in respiratory protection, we are well positioned to contribute positively to people using respiratory protection, which is more relevant than ever in the current environment.

We remain as we started in 1983, a non-profit volunteer organization. Our 340+ members from six regional sections are respected professionals representing a multitude of user groups, industrial hygienists, manufacturers, and regulators that are behind the standards and products that make up today's respiratory programs worldwide. As a society, we look forward to focusing on our three main goals: educational outreach, supporting and growing our sections, and improving our core society operations.

We have made educational outreach a key focus of the society and are pleased to have many volunteers to contribute to our mission. Our education committee is active to support the FACE-UP project, which is a follow up to the HIVE project on protecting individuals from volcanic ash, assisting with training materials and delivery. The FACE-UP project started in 2022, it is a project on protection of children from urban particulates with partners in Nepal and Indonesia.

Since March 2020, we have, as has the rest of the world, focused on web-based presence, including webinars from the European Section and the first ISRP virtual conference in May 2022. This conference was a full success, and it was a virtual place to learn, exchange and interact with members as well as guests of the society. The face-to-face conference needed to be postponed twice, as such an event could not be conducted in 2020 and 2022.

Still, our communications will focus on our web-based presence, including webinars from the European Section and the Americas section relating to COVID-19 response and new respiratory protection products (available through our YouTube channel ISRP Respiratory Protection - YouTube). We have a presence on LinkedIn that we encourage all members to follow. Our journal is now fully digital, and we are focused on further improvements, including making it more visible by access through the indexing service EBSCO. We have made many articles open access as they relate to provision of respiratory protection in the pandemic, and encourage authors to follow this model in future, as it makes their articles directly accessible. Lastly, we encourage our members to contact us with ideas for enhancing our on-line presence, as well as links to items of interest.

We hope that this pandemic will bring together the respiratory protection world in new ways to improve our capabilities and knowledge regarding protection from infectious diseases, and we encourage new members from the growing community.

I would like to extend my personal thanks to Eva Dickson our past president for all the work she has done to help the society, including the leading role in preparation of the 2022 virtual conference, and our secretary treasurer Jessica Tredinnick for the hard work of keeping the administration of our society on a good footing. A big thank you goes to the ISRP webmaster Michael Parham. I would ask you all to welcome Stephanie Lynch as our incoming vice-president.

Finally, I welcome your ideas, comments, and suggestions – please contact me at .

Gabriele Troescher, President ISRP