A review of the EUROSPINE annual general meeting, which took place in Lyon in October
The flagship event in the EUROSPINE calendar took place in Lyon at the beginning of October. The annual general meeting brought together professionals from across Europe and from further afield – South America, China, Japan, India and the Middle East – all with the aim of sharing the professional challenges of providing quality health care in diverse economic climates.
The programme committee put together a meeting programme of extraordinary scientific strength. Over three-days, we saw a total of seven non-parallel scientific sessions, six scientific lunch symposia, two debates on current controversial topics, as well as five concurrent quick-fire sessions. Particular highlights included the ‘best of show’ session, featuring the eight highest-scoring abstract submissions; the Medal and Awards lectures; as well as a Keynote presentation from the local host of our annual meeting.
Out of 606 validly submitted abstracts, 70 were chosen for oral presentations after undergoing a rigorous review process. Another 75 papers were selected for short communication/quick-fire presentation. The authors of a further 94 abstracts were given the chance to present their work as scientific posters throughout the meeting.
The award for Best Full Paper was given to Ferran Pellisé (Barcelona) and his team for their paper which compared the impact on health-related quality of life of adult spinal deformity with other chronic conditions. Meanwhile, Wouter Moojen, and colleagues from Leiden in the Netherlands, took the Best Podium Award for 2014 for their presentation of the long-term results of a randomised controlled trial comparing treatment with surgical interspinous implants against conventional decompression for lumbar spinal stenosis.
Delegates at the meeting benefited from additional features such as the EUROSPINE App, which offered easy access to scientific and logistic congress information, including details of the programme, speakers, sessions, posters and congress venue. The App also enabled delegates to capture the full experience of the meeting by participating in interactive voting, as well as being able to bookmark favourite sessions and read the exclusive e-version of the congress newspaper The Spine Times.
There were plenty of social networking opportunities during both the welcome reception, and the official congress evening, all of which were ‘green’ and fully compliant. Finally, the cloakroom and left-luggage facility raised much-needed funds for Unicef; as organisers, we would like to offer our thanks to the charming volunteers who helped to make that happen.
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President’s Prize
The activities of EUROSPINE support the next generation of healthcare professionals and, as a special challenge for this group, President Philip Sell, introduced the EUROSPINE 2014 President’s Prize. Young professionals were asked to submit an abstract entitled ‘How can the spinal trainees of today become the best spine specialists of tomorrow?’. First prize was awarded to Maryem-Fama Ismael Aguirre from Milan, Italy, who wrote that spinal trainees need to focus on personal training while advancing their specialty, and that the three pillars of personal motivation, a qualified mentor and a common training platform are necessary to achieve these goals. Second prize went to Tim Heiland of Ulm in Germany who believes that young trainees need to break boundaries and look to the trea