Presidential Introduction

Dear Colleague,

This year’s Annual Scientific Meeting at the East Midlands Conference Centre in Nottingham promises to be another great event, with something for everyone. Not only is the venue extremely well set out for both exhibitors and delegates, but there are excellent leisure facilities on site and very good value low cost accommodation.  Once again we have had a very good response from our partners in Industry, whose support we continue to value greatly.  Indeed we could not run these meetings without their assistance.  Plans for the training day on Wednesday are already well advanced, and this year many of our Council members will be helping to provide small group question and answer sessions around specific upper Gastrointestinal problems. 

This will follow the morning sessions involving technical skills training on simulation models.  I am delighted to report that Professor Ronnie Poon, Professor of HPB Surgery, in the University of Hong Kong, Dr Steven Strasberg, Professor of HPB surgery in Washington University, St Louis, Dr Pier Guilianotti, Professor of General, Minimally invasive and Robotic surgery in the University of Illinois, Chicago, and Dr Phil Schauer, Professor of Surgery at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine have already accepted our invitation to speak, as has Mr John Black, President of the RCS (England) and Professor Bruce Campbell, who will be speaking on behalf of NICE, regarding introduction of new surgical techniques.

The dinner in the Long Gallery of the world famous Nottingham Castle will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of the meeting and you are advised to book early as places are likely to be limited.  As always, meetings like these require an enormous amount of work behind the scenes and I am very grateful to our Honorary Secretary (and Local Organiser), Ian Beckingham along with Sheila Hodgson and Harriet Innes from our Secretariat office, for all they do. Professor John Primrose, our newly appointed Chairman of the Education and Training Committee, is working hard on the programme and I am grateful to him, as well as all the other Council members, for all their support.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in Nottingham.

Best Wishes
Yours sincerely

Simon Paterson-Brown
President, AUGIS