Back to the future — The European Society of Thoracic Surgeons

Abstract

Honoured guests, fellow thoracic surgeons, It is a very great privilege to have been the President of this Society during this past year. I have been fortunate in working with a determined, committed and goal-driven council, and in having huge support in particular from our General Secretary and the other officers in the council. I would like to thank you, the members of ESTS, for your engagement with and commitment to the Society. A President is only as effective as the people he or she represents. I want to use this address to take stock, and really look at what the European Society of Thoracic Surgeons has become. What have we achieved, and what do we stand for? I want to celebrate the important principles which we uphold as a Society and highlight some potential dangers we need to avoid. I would like you to think of a beautiful garden. All such creations are planted and nurtured by a team of dedicated gardeners. I could spend the rest of this address celebrating themany different gardeners who haveworked so hard and so faithfully to bring this garden, which is this Society, into such an abundance of opportunity. I am deliberately not naming them so that you can better appreciate the magnificence of this Society. The European Society of Thoracic Surgeons is the largest society of general thoracic surgeons in the world. We have 750 members in 28 countries, most of whom are dedicated general thoracic surgeons. If you take a conservative estimate that each member of ESTS sees five new patients a week, we represent surgeons who care for 200,000 new patients each year. You can see that this Society has an enormous influence on the care of patients across Europe with thoracic surgical problems. The breadth of our specialty, extending from lung transplantation to chest wall reconstruction, from management of trauma to minimally invasive lung resection tells us that those hundreds of thousands of