This has been a momentous year for USP as we continued the organization’s long history of developing standards that help people trust the quality of their medicines, supplements and foods in the US and around the world.
In addition to our ongoing work to develop quality standards, we have been collaborating with a broad range of stakeholders to leverage our standards-setting process, advocate for policy change, and provide technical assistance to help build capabilities to positively impact several urgent public health concerns, including the opioid crisis in the US, the global challenges of substandard and falsified medicines, and antimicrobial resistance.
This year is the beginning of the countdown to the USP Convention meeting in May 2020. Every five years, the USP Convention meets, bringing together delegates from member organizations representing scientific and healthcare perspectives from the US and worldwide. Ever since 11 physicians came together in 1820 over concerns about patient harm from inconsistent medical preparations, this body has continuously met to guide our work. Convention members vote on resolutions that help guide the organization over the upcoming five-year period and elect the USP Board of Trustees and the Council of Experts – the group that oversees USP’s standards-setting committees.
The year 2020 will mark an extraordinary milestone for USP – our 200th anniversary – and we have many exciting plans underway to recognize the organization’s legacy and impact. We often wonder whether those 11 visionary physicians who gathered in the US Senate to create USP nearly 200 years ago could possibly have imagined the legacy of trust they launched. Their passion for quality medicines has inspired generations of scientists, healthcare practitioners and others who volunteer their expertise to USP to help fulfill that legacy to this very day. Today, more than 750 of the world’s best minds in science, healthcare and academia serve on numerous Expert Committees and panels to help develop USP quality standards. We are grateful for their service and hope their critical work inspires others to join us – we simply couldn’t do this important work without them.
As we look forward to the 2020 USP Convention, we have launched our Call for Candidates to identify more scientific experts to participate in the standards-setting process for the next five years. If you are interested in opportunities to be a part of this work or know an exceptional candidate to recommend, we encourage you to find out more at usp.org/together.
It is our pleasure to share this report with you. We invite you to visit usp.org to learn more about the science behind our standards, our work as advocates for quality around the world and our collaborations to build capabilities essential to ensuring quality.
