Bermuda's business community suffers from "meetingitis'' as too many groups overlap to carry out the same functions, Hamilton Rotary Club heard yesterday.

Chamber of Commerce President Cris Valdes-Dapena said the Chamber could become the ideal focus point to help eradicate this "organisational cancer''.

"We each have too many meetings to go to. Each of the organisations we feel we need to support is probably tackling many of the same issues as at least one other organisation,'' she said.

"Worst of all, the activities of the various organisations with overlapping interests are often at variance with one another.'' Tourism has a plethora of bodies which were being brought together under Conduit Alliance, but other business sectors such as lawyers, doctors and accountants also had their advocacy groups.

These groupings were "typified by a complete lack of co-ordination and communication.

"It is hoped within the tourism sector that the Conduit Alliance will tie the tourism organisations together. In the general business arena, we have yet to even identify this role.

"For businesses, we seem to have organised intra-company relationships in a singularly unbusinesslike fashion.'' She told the meeting at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club in Hamilton that the Chamber was the only business organisation not tied to a single issue or sector.

"But it is not structured in a such a way as to avail itself of the abundant strength and valuable work already being done for their constituents by the other major organisations -- whose members are also our members.

"And it is precisely for this reason that we end up with wasteful duplications of effort, counterproductive activities, competitive bids for ownership of ideas where there should be co-operation, and a severe case of `meetingitis'.'' Cris Valdes-Dapena