ESGE news and upcoming events January 2025

Happy New Year!

Professor Ian M Gralnek, ESGE President

Dear ESGE Family,

As we close out 2024 and ring in 2025, I wish to take this opportunity to wish all of you and your families a very happy holiday season and a prosperous New Year!

2024 has been a very successful and exciting year for ESGE with many achievements and new projects launched that we believe will benefit you, our members, and the entire European GI endoscopy community. Please allow me to briefly update you on some of these 2024 activities and to look ahead to what awaits us all in 2025.

ESGE Days: Now without any doubt the premier European endoscopy congress, our annual meeting continues to be a huge success. ESGE Days 2024 was held in April in Berlin where we celebrated the 60^th Diamond Jubilee of ESGE! We had our highest attendance (more than 4,200 attendees) and highest number of submitted scientific abstracts ever – 1462! To remind you, ESGE Days is a 3-day congress that is “everything endoscopy” and is offered as both an on-site and a hybrid event. From basic to cutting edge endoscopy, ESGE Days offers something for everyone involved in GI endoscopy. ESGE Days 2025 will be held April 3–5, 2025, in Barcelona Spain. In addition to our didactic and interactive core scientific programme, we will have a “live and on site” postgraduate course held on April 2, 2025, the day prior to the congress. There will also be both basic and “cutting edge” hands on endoscopy training, an academic skills course, a symposium on “How to Teach Endoscopy”, original research presentations (oral, poster stage and e-poster formats), and of course the not-to-be-missed six hours of LIVE endoscopy from the Ramon y Cajal University Hospital in Madrid. I am also happy to announce that ESGE will join forces with ESGE’s member society from Spain, La Sociedad Española de Endoscopia Digestiva (SEED) for two combined clinical symposia on the first day of the congress (April 3, 2025). Our European and international Scientific Partners ASGE, CIRSE, EASL, ECCO, EGEUS, ESGENA JGES, KSGE, SIED, SOBED, WEO will present a variety of interactive joint sessions. Plus, ESGENA’s hugely successful endoscopy nurse training program “Spring School” will once again be at ESGE Days 2025.

During 2024, in celebration of ESGE’s 60^th diamond jubilee year, we launched several special programs and events.

Jubilee Editorials: Each month in the journal Endoscopy, ESGE’s official publication organ with the highest Impact Factor in the field of GI endoscopy (11.5), we featured a special article as part of a series “ESGE – Celebrating 60 Years of Advancing Quality in GI Endoscopy!

The ESGE Academy: We proudly launched an entirely new and wide-ranging online e-learning platform providing our members with a structured, searchable, and user-friendly library of ESGE’s educational content. We believe the ESGE Academy is an extremely valuable tool, especially for our younger endoscopy colleagues- if you haven’t yet, check it out today, especially as the App is now available!

The Next Generation Award: We introduced this award to recognize the most promising and emerging young investigators in endoscopic research. Our 2024 awardees were Giulio Antonelli, Michiel Bronswijk, Enrique Perez-Cuadrado-Robles, Nastazja Dagny Pilonis, Marco Spadaccini and Sanne van Munster. I look forward to seeing the talents that come to light in the 2025 edition of this award.

The ESGE Endoscopy Camp: In 2024, we launched for the first time this educational program aimed at endoscopy trainees and early career gastroenterologists/surgeons. The ESGE Endoscopy Camp 2024 was held in September in Zagreb Croatia with 60 “campers” from 21 countries. Over 2.5 days, they received hands-on training in basic GI endoscopy procedures alongside complimentary lectures, by world renowned GI endoscopy experts! The next ESGE Endoscopy Camp will be held September 12–14, 2025, in Milan, Italy.

Additional highlights for our membership currently include:

The ESGE Research Camp: In 2025, we will introduce another type of “camp”. The ESGE has designed the “Research Camp” as an interactive one-and-a-half-day course for early-career endoscopists. In this course, participants have the possibility to work closely with world-renowned researchers, rising stars, and top journal editors in GI endoscopy, and to discuss and develop their own research ideas.

Webinar Wednesdays: We recently held ESGEʼs very first LIVE endoscopy webinar, that focused on EUS and was transmitted from the Ramon y Cajal University Hospital in Madrid. Keep an eye on our varied programme and join us for a webinar soon!

The ESGE Travelling Endoscopy Programme (ESGE-TEP): This continues to be very popular with our member societies. The ESGE-TEP ”bringing ESGE to you”, aims to strengthen ESGE’s relationship with its 41member societies and our international partnering endoscopy societies. This educational programme disseminates ESGE’s guidelines and quality improvement measures through high level, evidence-based didactic lectures from internationally recognized experts at our member or partnering societies’ national meetings. In 2024, the ESGE-TEP visited; 20^th National Congress of Moroccan Society of Digestive Endoscopy, 56^th EPC meeting of the European Pancreatic Club, 10^th Congress of the Croatian Society of Gastroenterology, 18^th Educational and Discussion Gastroenterology Days (Czech Gastroenterological Society), 44^th Panhellenic Congress of Gastroenterology. More information on how your national society’s congress can apply for an ESGE-TEP can be found on our website.

Research and Fellowship Grants: These career-changing opportunities remain as popular as ever. Our fellowship grant programme has adapted and, as of this year, we are offering 35 places for “Observational Training with Experts”, for a period of four weeks, at some of the most highly regarded endoscopy units across the world. Research grants not only provide a valuable financial injection to a project but, with the final stage of the application process being the Research Champions’ Den at ESGE Days, they allow the researchers to present on an international stage and receive input from the ‘ESGE dragon’ experts.

Innovation of the year Award: Each year we recognize outstanding innovations in the field of GI endoscopy. In 2024, we awarded the ESGE Innovation Awards – “Best New Device” to Louis-Jean Masgnaux and Jean Grimaldi (France) and “Best Procedural Innovation” to Yen-I Chen and Ali Bessissow (Canada). Applications for the Innovation of the Year 2024 are currently open, closing January 21, 2025.

I am very happy to report that ESGE’s membership continues to steadily grow. ESGE now has more than 4,200 individual members, with many joining by way of our highly successful “dual membership” programme.

Also, please let me remind you of our “Fellow” of ESGE (FESGE) designation, an honorary title bestowed upon an individual by the ESGE in recognition of significant professional achievement and competence within our field of GI endoscopy. More information on this prestigious title can be found on the ESGE website.

We are currently updating ESGE’s strategic plan that was initially developed in 2019. The strategic plan is vital to the society and allows ESGE to better serve our members. ESGE’s vision as a society is to work together to provide to our community the professional tools to provide optimal patient care through high quality GI endoscopy. Our mission is to continuously support education, training, and innovation towards that vision. ESGE’s strategic plan, ready by ESGE Days 2025 and available on our website, will provide a 5-year roadmap to better guide ESGE in furthering our vision and mission. These activities are only possible due to our very active and dedicated Governing Board and ESGE committees and working groups.

In closing, I will be completing my 2-year term as ESGE President at the conclusion of ESGE Days 2025. It has been an honour and a pleasure to serve our members and our society. I wish to thank my executive committee Cesare Hassan, Raf Bisschops, Mariana Arvanitakis, and Helmut Messmann for their support and assistance during my presidential tenure. I also wish to thank the ESGE Governing Board for all their hard work and dedication. It has been wonderful working with each and every one of you. Last, but not least, thank you to the ESGE Office. Ms. Jennifer Haas, ESGE’s Executive Director, and her team at the ESGE Office do an amazing job and without their efforts and enthusiasm ESGE could not achieve what it is achieving.

I am fully confident that our society will be in very good hands for the coming years, and I wish Cesare Hassan, ESGE’s incoming president, the best of luck in his presidency. I will be here as the past-president to support him and the society.

On behalf of the ESGE Executive Committee, the Governing Board and the ESGE Office, I wish you and your families a happy and peaceful New Year!

Ian M. Gralnek
ESGE President

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Artikel online veröffentlicht:
19. Dezember 2024