Dear RBSS members, 

What a privilege to become president of the Royal Belgian Society for Surgery. I am a hernia surgeon. Yes indeed. Specialized in abdominal wall surgery. Doing just that. Yes, that is a thing. Becoming president of our overarching surgical Belgian society feels like an important step in the recognition of our sub-specialty. Thank you.

The surgical landscape is changing rapidly with more surgeons focusing on a limited field of the surgical spectrum and the "general surgeon" working alone slowly disappearing because of centralization of care into specialized hospitals or between surgeons within surgical teams. Larger surgical groups allow for a better work-life balance and for a higher volume of specific surgical diseases allowing for more dedicated up-to-date patient care.

Training the future generation of surgeons is the next challenge for our profession. How to train within the working time restrictions? How to determine the number of surgeons needed? And the number needed for specific subspecialities? How many years should we train before getting into a subspeciality trajectory?

One of the privileges of being president of RBSS is to organize the yearly congress of the society aka Belgian Surgical Week. Since the renovation of the Thermae Palace hotel is postponed for another year, we are happy to meet again April 24^th -26^th 2025 in Ostend. The theme will be: "The Impact of patient/surgeon gender on surgical outcome". Surely a theme that can inspire and create interesting discussions. See you all there.

Filip Muysoms MD PhD
Abdominal wall surgeon
AZ Maria Middelares Gent & Sint Vincentius Deinze

President of the Royal Belgian Surgical Society 2024-2025