by A. Poncelet
It is a pleasure to address a few words today as the current president of our national scientific society.
As an introduction and to start on a positive message, I have decided to pick up some figures from the pooled nationwide activity over the last decade to shows to each of us that though our field is evolving rapidly, cardiac surgery is here to remain. It is our duty to keep up to these changes and also probably to initiate further ones to our advantage by innovation, improving quality of care and better communication with the public.
Most of the members present today in the audience will probably remember that over the last years under the former presidency of both Drs Jacques Goldstein and Inez Rodrigus, the BACTS has modified its constitution and its internal by-laws.
Most of these time-consuming efforts were being made to adhere to changes in the federal laws and legislation on non-profit organizations.
Among the visible throughput of those changes, the term of the BACTS presidency was increased to a two-year time period.
At that time, all Board members felt that the one-year period that had been established from the birth of the Society was too short in getting acquainted to the job, in increasing efficiency to mature important projects and bringing them to live.
After this first year of presidency, my personal appreciation is that I can only agree with the changes that were initiated.
At the end of 2007, the Board composition was increased to include 12 members and not less than 6 new Board members were elected, most of them from a younger generation, most of us should I say, as compare as during the first decade of life of our Society.
Anyone would agree that it takes time to apprehend people and the five Board meeting as well as other pre-congress meetings that took place during this past year has allowed each of us to better appreciate one’s sometime diverging point of view on matters as diverse as communication, organization, or strategy.
As written as the 3rd point in the bylaws of the Society, the BACTS has to defend its member’s professional interests: This year again, the Board discussed and took official positions in sometimes heavily politically-embedded issues
such as the attempt to define new cardiac surgical landscape in Belgium,
such as obtaining a formal and legally validated certificate of competence to perform cardiac surgery in Belgium (and therefore, potentially into the EU countries)
or defining its position as a national scientific society for the implementation of new technologies. Percutaneous valve implantation, the topic of our cardiac lecture later today, typically brings in our society to question on the benefits, drawbacks, and pitfalls, of this emerging and still expensive technology and at the same time brings in potential financial conflicts or issues among cardiac centers throughout the country.
I would just suggest to those sharing interest in TAVI to spend some time in reading both ESC and EACTS joint committee articles published earlier in 2008 before making their own judgement.
As eluded to in the May’s Newsletter, after the debriefing of November 2007 Annual meeting, the Board had decided to focus on three specific issues for the incoming years:
- Increasing BACTS member’s interest to actively participate in the Annual scientific meeting
- Increasing BACTS visibility among other Belgian surgical societies through increased participation in joint events such as the annual Belgian Surgical week,
- Initiate a registry in thoracic surgery as a tool to improve quality of care in thoracic surgical patients nationally.
Chairing the scientific committee for a couple of years now, I am still puzzled by the low submission rate that our National meeting suffers and wonder why. An argument that I often am facing when discussing on this point is the following :
Could that be that the society has not reached a critical mass yet to produce high quality abstracts annually?
For those dubious among you, with the help of one of our secretary, I have searched PubMed for two separate years, 2001 and 2007 and numbered the published articles that were generated by the surgical teams working in 6 different universities across the country.
In six years, the scientific production has doubled, with some modifications in the shares between the centers. To me, this clearly demonstrates that the raw material to build a high quality meeting is present and that what we need is active participation.
For 2009, the BACTS board has decided to increase its participation to the largest national surgical event in order to increase the bridges between general and cardio-thoracic surgeons who sometimes share common interests, such as the thoracic and vascular surgical practice. One of our sponsored sessions will be devoted to the thoracic field and will concentrate on multi-disciplinarity and data reporting for quality outcomes. The second will be both a cardiac and ethical session as it was initiated a few years ago and will include both update reports from the Database Committee and the College of Cardiac Surgeons.
The last point, as most of you know, is much along the line of the cardiac registry but has at least two draw-backs
1/ It lacks the royal decree that prevails in the cardiac community, and its mandatory aspect to participate in building-in data
2/ It suffers from the absence of homogeneity as a surgical activity in comparison to the 28 current Belgian centers which offers cardiac surgical care in Belgium.
However, a BACTS thoracic task force has been set up that will pursue efforts together with the European Society of Thoracic Surgeon, to create such a web-based, voluntary and easy to use registry.
We know that there will be, as for other web-based registries such as EuroTransplant, EACTS Dbase,.. information from and back to the reporting center in order to motivate center participation.
Since we are getting close to December 5th, I will take the opportunity of the floor to commemorate one of our society senior member as well as one of my former mentor in surgery. It will be a year soon since Professor Robert Ponlot passed away and I felt that our society should acknowledge his life-long work and efforts to improve the care of cardiac and thoracic patients nationwide.
To finish this formal address, I would like to thanks all participating Board members for their time, their energy and their commitments, all of which are needed to keep a national society alive and well and I wish I will be back to this assembly next year with further advancement in most of our projects described today.
I hope you will enjoy gathering around on this Saturday.