As many times before Coloplast supported World Ostomy Day 2018 with its Merit Award Competition. We thank them for that with deep appreciation for their work.
Many organisations from all over the EOA territory handed in documents to compete for the award. All those organisations presented very good ideas and activities and were all worthy of winning an award. But there needs to be one winner and this time the winner in Europe and Africa was deemed to be Czech Ilco. They did an extremely good job throughout the whole year. Both to create awareness about ostomy in the Czech society and to bring focus on the life, troubles and victories of ostomastes. I am very proud to have been a participant in a small way in one of their projects. Bicycling from Prague to Novi Jicin in the east of the Czech Republic was an exiting and fun challenge. I hope that the whole WOD effort of Czech Ilco will be an example to other organizations.
As I was on the judging panel I had to review all of the documents provided by the competing organisations and there were some pleasant surprises among them. I learned of new organisations in the southern part of Africa, namely from Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. None of those are EOA members so that they could not win the competition. But some of them were close to having won had they been members of EOA.
I plan to contact these organisations in the next weeks. But it would also be very pleasant if EOA member organisations would provide us with reports of their activities on WOD. Pictures would be highly appreciated.
The winner in America was the organisation from Bolivia and in Asia and the Pacific area the winner was New Zealand. They had very different projects and reports but both were worthy of winning the award.
Jon Thorkelsson, president of EOA.
