S-ECCO
18December2023

Multidisciplinary Approach to Clinical Trials

Amy Lightner, S-ECCO Member

Amy Lightner
© ECCO

The increasing complexity of care for patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) has driven the need for multidisciplinary care.  This has led centres and practices to hold regular multidisciplinary team meetings (MDTs) at which specialists in gastroenterology, surgery, radiology and pathology discuss patients. It has also led to joint clinics where practice environments allow patients to be seen by specialists in both gastroenterology and surgery, and even in some cases by experts in stoma therapy, nutrition and psychology, all on the same day. This allows for greater cross-disciplinary dialogue and more consistent messaging to the patient, which improves the quality of care and overall patient experience.

Posted in ECCO News, Volume 18, Issue 4, Committee News, S-ECCO

26October2023

The making of an IBD surgeon

Alaa El-Hussuna, S-ECCO Member

Alaa El-Hussuna
© ECCO

How do you make a surgeon? Not by the preliminaries, the 6-7 years of medical college and the years that follow in residency training, but by the six or seven years subsequently spent after medical school learning the surgical trade. Exactly what happens in this apprenticeship that transforms him\her from a helpless, frightened medical school graduate into a (hopefully) capable and confident surgeon?

Posted in ECCO News, Committee News, Volume 18, Issue 3, S-ECCO

15June2023

National IBD Pathways

Pär Myrelid, S-ECCO Chair

Pär Myrelid
© ECCO

In many countries, cancer patients have had structural pathways for a number of years. Regardless of whether these are called two-week referrals, urgent referrals or cancer pathways, they have improved the care for many patients with a suspected malignancy. In a society with limited access to medical care, however, an improvement like this may come at a cost. Unfortunately, patients with chronic disease may be among those paying the price for the structural pathways within Oncology. This price comes in many different forms, but for our Inflammatory Bowel Disease patients it particularly involves prolonged waiting times for radiology, endoscopy and surgery. Thus the improvement achieved for patients with, for example, suspected colorectal cancer may at the same time represent an impairment for patients with an increased risk of developing the same type of cancer as intervals between endoscopic surveillance sessions tend to increase.

Posted in ECCO News, ECCO'23, Committee News, Congress News, Volume 18, Issue 2, S-ECCO

27April2023

Report on the 12th S-ECCO IBD Masterclass

Pär Myrelid, S-ECCO Chair

Pär Myrelid
© ECCO

The 18th ECCO Congress and 12th S-ECCO IBD Masterclass provided many of us with the opportunity finally to meet in real life and delivered much new knowledge and numerous new insights. This year’s Masterclass was opened by Christianne Buskens, who in a very distinct manner showed us what kind of effect the pandemic and all virtual meetings have had on us by showing a picture from last year’s virtual meeting (we all looked terribly concerned and sad). This can be compared with a picture from this year’s meeting, where good old friends reunited to discuss IBD.

Posted in ECCO News, ECCO'23, Committee News, Congress News, Volume 18, Issue 1, S-ECCO

19December2022

E-QUALITY, complex IBD surgery and dishwashers

Omar D. Faiz, S-ECCO Member

Omar D. Faiz
© ECCO

This week my dishwasher broke down. I hadn’t ever been in this situation before, so I called my plumber. He laughed at me and told me that he didn’t do stuff like that anymore. Instead, he gave me a number for a ‘kitchen appliance repair guy’. Since when have we developed specialists in the repair of kitchen appliances? I didn’t even know that such specialists exist. How the world around us has changed in the last 25 years! I called the number and the receptionist who answered my call was direct and to the point. She asked what the appliance was. ‘A Zanussi’, I said. ‘Why?’ ‘Well, it’s because we have different engineers for the different makes’, she said in her south London patois. Anyway, I spoke with the engineer who ‘ran a diagnostic check’ over the phone by instructing me remotely to push various buttons on the machine under his instruction. In doing so he demonstrated an ability to drive at the same time as guiding me around, from memory, the control panel of my model. He clearly has the patience of Job! When he promptly arrived a day later, he laid out his tools neatly in a semi-circle on the kitchen floor. He had brought specific ‘parts’ with him that he thought he might need. After about 20 minutes the task was complete – the washer was back in working order. He asked me to sign his form and within an hour of his leaving I received electronically a feedback form to comment on his promptness, manner and efficacy. As far as kitchen appliance repair guys go, he was awesome! A true master craftsman.

Posted in ECCO News, Committee News, Volume 17, Issue 4, S-ECCO

13October2022

Challenges in pre-operative optimisation of patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Alaa El-Hussuna, S-ECCO Member

Alaa El-Hussuna
© ECCO

Optimisation is the action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource (Oxford Dictionary) but in the medical world it is preparing the patient (and the surgeon) for surgery and postoperative recovery.

The goal of “optimising” patients’ health prior to surgery is to minimise the risk of postoperative complications, decrease the length of hospital stay, reduce unplanned re-admissions and enhance overall health and surgical experience.

Posted in ECCO News, Committee News, S-ECCO, Volume 17, Issue 3

15June2022

The aftermath of the pandemic

Pär Myrelid, S-ECCO Member

Pär Myrelid
© ECCO

By now we are all hoping that the cases of COVID-19 that we still see represent the beginning of the end of the pandemic. For more than two years, the health care system has been overloaded globally and the whole world has been suffering. Initially we struggled with severely ill COVID-19 patients filling up ICU wards at more or less every hospital, and in addition theatre staff were often asked to help out with COVID-19 patients rather than assisting in theatres. At some hospitals the theatres were turned into extra ICU wards. This was made easier by the fact that during the early days of the pandemic the normal emergency cases seemed to have disappeared. Just like prior to a tsunami, where the water withdraws before the giant wave hits, the emergency rooms were left empty for some days or even weeks. A deceptive calmness soon gave way to chaos.

Posted in ECCO News, Committee News, S-ECCO, Volume 17, Issue 2

28April2022

Report on the 11th S-ECCO IBD Masterclass

Christianne Buskens, S-ECCO Chair

Christianne Buskens
© ECCO

In contrast to what we had hoped, the 11th S-ECCO Masterclass was again a virtual event due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, as everyone has slowly got used to online conferences, it almost felt intimate to meet like this once more.

Posted in ECCO News, Committee News, Congress News, ECCO'22, S-ECCO, Volume 17, Issue 1

16December2021

Surgical training

Pär Myrelid, S-ECCO Member

Pär Myrelid
© ECCO

Many technical innovations are facilitating the education process involved in training a skilled surgeon today. At the same time, this process is in many ways still a joint collaboration between a master and his/her apprentice, and will continue to be so. Fruitful training in any practical setting is based on trust, from both parties, in combination with application of the experience of the master in order to sort out any perioperative complications. Beyond acquisition of the necessary technical skill, becoming a surgeon requires the development of a sound understanding of when to operate and when not to, as well as the ability to choose the right surgical option. This is, of course, important in all surgical fields but it is perhaps especially true within the field of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).

Posted in ECCO News, Committee News, S-ECCO, Volume 16, Issue 4

25March2021

Impact of COVID-19 on surgical IBD care

Michel Adamina, S-ECCO Chair on behalf of Christianne Buskens, Omar Faiz, Pår Myrelid, Hagit Tulchinsky

Michel Adamina
© ECCO

For the past year the COVID-19 pandemic has raged across the world, with wave after wave of the disease. No country has been spared and no end is in sight in the near future. A recent position paper from the ECCO COVID-19 Taskforce presented the ten ‘dos and don’ts’ when caring for IBD patients. S-ECCO Members are involved in the specialised surgical care of IBD patients in many countries and a variety of institutions. Hence, we are offering this opinion piece on the performance of IBD surgery during the pandemic.

Posted in ECCO News, Committee News, S-ECCO, Volume 16, Issue 1