The Australian Government will provide 4 million dollars to the University of Western Sydney to help establish a National Institute for Complementary Medicine.

The institute will develop national priorities for complementary medical research and will coordinate work on these priorities with other research bodies, with an emphasis on clinical trials and studies on herbal medicines.

The institute will also support postdoctoral training to ensure that the industry has the research personnel it needs to expand. It will also provide research findings to the medical community and general public.

The Commonwealth Government has also provided $5 million in grants through the National Health and Medical Research Council to investigate the use and effectiveness of complementary and alternative medicines.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare statistics show that Australians spend about $1 billion annually on complementary and alternative medicines, including vitamin supplements, homeopathic medicines and traditional Asian and Indigenous medicines.

The first part of the conference included a number of key speeches from members of the EU Commission, European Parliament, Slovakian Government etc. The second part of the conference included a number of parallel workshops, one of which was on the theme of "CAM and Health Strategy in an Enlarged EU".

EFCAM was one of the organisations that co-organised and co-financed the workshop and EFCAM Coordinator Stephen Gordon (also General Secretary of the European Council for Classical Homeopathy ECCH) gave one of the presentations in the first part of the workshop.

The panel of speakers and their subjects can be accessed in the attached pdf document of the abstracts of the workshop presentations. cam presentation abstracts.pdf