Andrej BANIČ, EURAPS President 2011-2012

Dear Colleagues and members,

It is a great honour for me to be elected president of EURAPS. I have participated in all past meetings and have witnessed its evolution form a small group that had many similarities with the Alpine Workshop to a large club of the best European plastic surgeons. Since the European plastic surgery is entering the second decade of the „new millennium“ I think it is a good time for a short analysis of the achievements of the last ten years and to take look at future opportunities and threats to our field and our organization in the coming years.

The interest in our specialty is doubtlessly growing throughout Europe. This is reflected both in the strong increase in the membership applications and member numbers. It is obvious that we are witnessing an increasing number of European plastic surgeons that are motivated in achieving not only competence but also excellence. The number of good abstracts is on the rise and it is getting increasingly difficult to select the best and to refuse the good ones. The opening of our organization towards the new European Union countries demanded timely changes in the statutes and the application procedures. Furthermore, the participation of non-European plastic surgeons enriches our knowledge and helps us keep the quality standards of the meetings at very high levels.

However, there are some problems that we have to tackle. Due to the large number of presentations our meetings tend to get longer and some presentations shorter. We have always refused to run parallel sessions and we should stick to this principle. We should be aware, however, that too long meetings can turn some participants away. The selection of presentations is difficult and we should keep the strict criteria. However, we should keep in mind that we cannot apply the same criteria that we use for the scientific presentations in some other fields for example the aesthetic ones. Aesthetic presentations are under-represented in our meetings and due to an increasing number of aesthetic meetings elsewhere we might loose the audience for this important part of our speciality.

Despite the ups-and-downs of European and world economies all four pillars of our specialty continue to thrive. We should continue to support young plastic surgeons with our well-established fellowships and the Hans Anderl award. However, we should try to help our young colleagues from less developed, mainly east European countries to be able to participate in our meetings and thus improve their knowledge. We should find a way to offer fellowships under less strict criteria and with some financial support.

The coming years will be characterized by further advances in research including stem cell-transfer, tissue fusion, anti aging therapy and composite tissue allografts to name only a few. We have to invest a lot of energy to keep the research part of EBOPRAS growing and prevent alienated it.

I’ll work hard with the executive committee and the secretary general in particular to help achieve the above goals. I hope that I’ll be able to present a positive report at the end of my presidential term.

Best regards

Andrej Banic

EURAPS President