Reports from the Education, Training and Research Committee
Professor John Primrose
Chair, Education and Training Committee
My usual opening line to this report in the last year has been that this is my last report as Chair of the Education, Training and Research Committee. This seems never to quite be fulfilled but at least now I can congratulate Giles Toogood on being elected to succeed me. Giles has been tremendously successful in getting the GBIHPBA off the ground and will I am sure be a very successful Chair for the committee. The caveat is that I will continue until the June AUGIS/DDF meeting which essentially completes my term in the role. I will work with Giles over the next 6 months to put in place a revised structure for the committee which will
serve for the next 4 years.
Preparation for the AUGIS/DDF meeting in June 2012 is now almost complete. It is certainly a world class event over 4 days and has a very large component of upper GI surgery as well as many other generic GI sessions. Specific AUGIS speakers include Rob Padbury (Adelaide) and BJS Lecturer 2012, Cornelius van der Velde (Netherlands), Jan van Lanschot (Netherlands) and Sabine Tejpar (Belgium). The meeting will combine with BSG, BAPEN and BASL to produce the first comprehensive GI meeting in the UK. If as anticipated this is a great success the plan is to have a further meeting in 2015 in London and the venue is now booked. A key feature of the 2012 meeting is the DDF symposia all of which are multidisciplinary and many of which have major AUGIS contributions. The meeting will include an AUGIS “plenary” session with a series of major international speakers including those mentioned above. The meeting will begin with a Training Day on Sunday the 17th June 2012 which includes a joint session with gastroenterology trainees, focusing on areas of controversy in medical and surgical approaches in to upper GI problems. The aim is to have a “viva” session in the afternoon in the same format as previously. The main meeting then runs from Monday through to Wednesday. There will be AUGIS parallel sessions at the meeting also and hopefully timetabling will avoid these competing with other important sessions for upper GI surgeons. The social programme is well developed and included a Monday evening event at the Pan Am adjacent to the conference venue.
The 2015 E-AHPBA meeting will be held in Manchester, in some ways a problem since AUGIS is committed to the DDF Meeting in June 2015. At present negotiations are underway to try to colocate the meeting with the 2015 International Surgical congress of the ASGBI. This would provide a high profile event for UK HPB surgery. Meantime the new GBIHPBA is getting underway and in 2012 a meeting at the Belfrey in September has been organised by Giles Toogood and colleagues and aimed at trainees. The ALPS meeting in Madonna di Campliglio in late January 2012 continues to be a major educational HPB meeting and again we have major participation from the Dutch surgeons. The Faculty includes Eric Vibert (Paris), Olivier Farges (Paris), Ugo Boggi (Pisa), Umberto Cillo (Padua) and Christos Dervinas (Athens). This meeting grows in scale year on year and from a small number of participants in the first year it is now one Europe’s major HPB surgical meetings. Space now is tight but there is still limited availability.
Training continues to be a major issue in general surgery. Many of you will have seen the paper by Bill Allum and the various commentaries in the Journal of the ASGBI (formerly Newsletter). It is clear to me now that going down a route of sub-specialisation recognition at CCT (other than vascular which is becoming a sub-specialty in its own right) is in nobody’s interests, least of all trainees. The more generic CCT allows further differentiation in a Consultant career allows a change of direction if circumstances demand. It is clear that the need in most DGHs is a general GI surgeon with broad spread of expertise and usually a special interest. This is especially important from the point of view of the emergency workload. Although ACP seems wedded to a specialist CCT in colorectal surgery it is unclear that this is supported by the constituency. It is noteworthy that T&O and Urology have maintained a general CCT despite very highly differentiated Consultant practice in many cases. It seems sensible for general surgery and specifically GI surgery to do the same.
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