Dear E-AHPBA members,
Many of you will have attended the IHPBA meeting in Geneva in September, this year. After the very successful E-AHPBA meeting in Mainz in 2017, the IHPBA congress in Geneva was an enormous success. Where the Mainz congress had about over a thousand registered participants, Geneva almost tripled that number. The organising committee, including Prof. Clavien and his crew, deserve an enormous compliment for this. It is obviously not only about numbers, but also about the atmosphere, the quality of the presentations and the interaction and friendship that result from this amongst HPB professionals. It goes without saying that the success of these two meetings have also helped immensely in creating a situation where the E-AHPBA has increased its membership in the past 2 years from 600 to 1000 members. This, in turn, has helped to considerably stabilise the E-AHPBA also financially. Many of the new members are young surgeons and it is hoped that they will enjoy the IHPBA/E-AHPBA joint membership in such a way that they stay on board.
As the next E-AHPBA meeting will be in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2019, this gives the HPB community another opportunity to meet and greet – and join forces. The Organising Committee, under the leadership of Prof. Olivier Busch, has managed to reserve the ‘Beurs van Berlage’ in the center of Amsterdam for the E-AHPBA Congress. In Amsterdam, considerable focus will be on multidisciplinary aspects of HPB, including doctors and allied health professionals, and also on what collaboration within a small country can achieve in terms of multicenter trials and big data.
Best wishes
Kees Dejong,
E-AHPBA Secretary General
