CHAIRMANS MESSAGE
Dear SASS members and guests
As President and congress academic coordinator, I invite you to the 2012 SASS congress to be held at the newly refurbished CSIR facilities in Pretoria.
Norman Fisher Jeffes and I have started working on a provisional program focussing on tumour management, cervical myelopathy and lumbar degenerative disease with the assistance of well recognised international leaders in these fields.
Stefano Boriani from Italy is well recognised as a world leader in spinal oncology with excellent reported results on en bloc resections of primary tumours, especially Chordoma. Not only will he share his experience of surgical expertise but assist us with the principles of spine tumour management.
Vincent Pontillart from France is well known to our society and will engage us on degenerative cervical pathology with his usual clear approach to decision making.
Rudi Bertagnoli of disc replacement fame is also well known to us from previous visits. In addition to sharing his experience in this area, he will assist us with the anterior lumbar spinal approaches and managing the complications thereof.
Shankar Acharya from India will bring a wide range of input from a medical arena similar to ours – the challenges of first world care in a resource constrained environment.
Dr Stark from the USA will address us on sacro-iliac pathology and the management thereof.
In addition there will be the usual smattering of local papers both free and invited dealing with medical, ethical and practice based issues. With the continually mounting pressure from funders and government we need to pay increasing attention to the administrative issues, educating our membership on appropriate and effective practice administration and “safe practice” to minimise medico-legal threats. As a society we also need to decide on what is unacceptable practice and protect our livelihood and patients from the threats caused by the few “outlier” surgeons. What better place to discuss this than at the SASS annual meeting.
Abstracts can be submitted to Hendrika on congress@saspine.org by 28 February 2012
Join us for an academically challenging and socially enjoyable congress.
Regards
Robert Dunn
Chairman: SASS Congress 2012
