Surgical Week Subsite 2021

Kris Vanhaecht is an  Associate Professor at Leuven University involved in research & teaching in Quality in Healthcare within the Leuven Institute for Healthcare Policy, Faculty of Medicine. He is Policy Advisor on Quality Management at the University Hospitals Leuven & Flemish Hospital Network. On international level he collaborates with Dutch hospitals on leadership development, with the Western Norway Research Network on Integrated Care, Helse Fonna on care pathways and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Boston on quality & safety management. He is an expert on quality for the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQUA).

He is the Secretary General of the European Pathway Association (www.E-P-A.org), an international not for profit association to support knowlegde sharing, research & teaching on the organization of care processes. He leads the European Quality of Care Pathway Study. Specialties: Care pathways, care process organization, quality, safety , healthcare, second victims after adverse events, mangomoments In 2017 he launched the "In search of Mangomoments" movement on patient centered care, in which health care workers provide happiness to patients with unexpected little gestures.

His motto is “Quality is the result of care”

Kris will discuss medical errors from the point of view of the perpetrator ; the “second victim” at Thursday morning’s September 9th plenary session.

Dr Tessa Richards is a senior editor at The BMJ and leads the BMJs patient partnership initiative. She was trained at Guy’s hospital in London and worked as a general physician and  rheumatologist in the NHS before joining the BMJ editorial staff. Here she has led the journals GP, Education and Analysis sections and established the Overdiagnosis series ( part of the BMJs Too Much Medicine campaign) and one on High Integrity Health.

She is a member of the Royal College of Physicians, a BMJ columnist and writes regularly on patient perspectives. Series she has co-ordinated include ones on medical education, medicine in India, HMO’s and medicine in Europe.

BMJ theme issues commissioned include Health in the Middle East, Partnering with Patients, and Patient Centred Care. She has a long standing interest in global health and European Health policy and is a regular writer and speaker on the importance and potential of patient and public partnership in healthcare and health research

She lives since 2004 with stage IV adrenal cancer, hyperparathyroidy and pernicious anemia, and is a carer for close family members with rheumatoid arthritis, dementia, and blindness.

Her own experience as a professional and a patient makes her the ideal person to talk about patient’s involvement in medical care.

Tessa’s talk “ Sharing ideas, decisions and power with patients” will  be  set on Thursday’s September 9th plenary session between 11am and 1 pm.

John C. Alverdy, MD, FACS Sarah and Harold Lincoln Thompson Professor of Surgery, University of Chicago, USA

 John Alverdy, MD, FACS, is a leading surgeon-scientist with a focus on the molecular basis of surgical infections and the gut microbiome. Dr. Alverdy is the Sarah and Harold Lincoln Thompson Professor of Surgery and executive vice-chair, department of surgery, University of Chicago, IL. He has served in leadership positions at many national organizations. He was the 2016 president of the Surgical Infection Society. He received the American Surgical Association’s Flance-Karl Award in 2018 for his groundbreaking work in surgical infection pathogenesis and microbiome research.

Dr. Alverdy has for sure traveled a non-conventional - out of the box -  path to become  the renowed scientist he is now . He was a Spanish major as an undergraduate with a minor in biology. His love of language and travel sent him on a path to foreign affairs schools with the intention of becoming a diplomat. He had little interest in becoming a physician except for the fact that his father, a dentist and son of an immigrant, insisted he would go to medical school. In an interview with the ACS bulletin, he recalls the day he spoke with his advisor, who felt that graduate school in biology would be his best bet to successfully compete for admission to an American medical school. Ironically, he had a strong distaste for biology, so being relatively fluent in Spanish, without applying to any American medical schools, he headed off to medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico where he graduated from. After having  spent one year at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, Maywood, IL he completed a surgical residency at Michael Reese Hospital, an aliate of the University of Chicago at the time. He completed a surgical research fellowship at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF).

His first big discovery was to demonstrate, for the first time, that intestinal bacteria sense host stress, such as what occurs following injury, and then respond with enhanced virulence. At a time when everyone was studying how the host immune system responds to bacteria, he asked, “How do bacteria respond to the host?” and thought that pathogens are present in our patients all the time, so something about surgical injury must trigger them to express virulence, not accepting that serious infections were just a random encounter with a very bad pathogen. He showed that bacteria sense the physiologic stress of surgery by binding soluble compounds released by host tissues that transduce their quorum sensing resulting in virulence activation.

He is a clinician as well, of course. He performs a wide variety of complex minimally invasive and open gastrointestinal surgical procedures with decades of experience in the field. Dr. Alverdy is nationally recognized for introducing several new operations into the field, including minimally invasive pancreatic surgery, bariatric surgery, and surgery for disorders of the foregut including the esophagus and stomach. He is one of the University of Chicago Hospitals’ most accomplished critical care surgeons and serves as the director for the Surgical Treatment of Obesity Program.

Dr. Alverdy accepted to give in November 2020 already two lectures during the virtual BSW dedicated to COVID-19, and for the 22nd BSW in Antwerp he will enlighten us during both plenary sessions on September 9th and 10th.

 Dear Colleagues,

The 22nd Belgian Surgical Week will take place in the Antwerp Elisabeth Centre (www.FMCCA.com), from Thursday 8^th to Saturday 11^th September 2021.

The scientific theme of the meeting, suggested by the President, and approved by the full Board is

"Connecting the dots"

We hope this theme will be an inspiration to the different affiliated societies and sections when preparing their programs.

COVID – 19 has taught the surgical community many lessons. We have learned what it is to be in “lock-down”, not to be able to see patients nor colleagues. It has taught us the value of tele- and video conferencing, which has showed us that many of the movements we did are not necessary. However, most of us have also realized the importance of sharing moments with colleagues to discuss surgical techniques or just drinking a beer, spending a moment of conviviality.   

The “BSW-light” was born out of necessity, but proved to be a success with over 500 colleagues attending and record numbers of colleagues, over 100, joining the virtual free paper sessions and the plenary session.

Due to insecurities surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the RBSS has not yet decided in which format (virtual or hybrid) the BSW 2021 will take place. Communication on this matter will follow in the coming months. This should, however, have no impact on abstract submission and the reviewing process. Therefore, we send out this call for abstracts.