Between progress and changing times: The journey of UEG Education Committee's chair.

Abstract

This year, 30th UEG Week was a time of great celebration and one which I enjoyed more than ever.1 It does however represent the final meeting associated with my time as UEG Education Committee Chair. So inevitably it was also associated with some sadness. UEG Education has come on leaps and bounds in the last years. I first joint the team in 2013 at which time I became the Chair of the newly developed E-learning Taskforce. At that time, UEG had already established the OLGa platform (Online Learning in Gastroenterology), and the taskforce was set up to take this to the next level.2 Initially, we worked on the structure of the platform, the content that we were going to provide and the ways in which to provide them. This meant establishing the UEG Library and concentrating on new online courses. In 2014, we then brought the e-learning team into the Education Committee with a plan to develop education further, to provide accessible and up to date information to all UEG Member Societies, and to ensure that the content provided was always cutting edge and up to date.3 I had the great pleasure during that period of working with Marco Bruno and Heinz Hammer as Education Committee Chairs, and with their help we developed the online platform further.4 With a great deal of work and collaboration with multiple experts in their fields, we increased the online users of our courses from a number of over 40 in 2013, to nearly 13,000 unique users today. Within the Education Committee we were always trying to think of different ways to learn from the experience of others. It was the idea of our greatly missed colleague, Tomer Adar,5 that we learn best from mistakes, and the concept of the ‘Mistakes in…’ series was born.6 We have published over 60 articles now, and this is always an extremely popular session at UEG Week, most recently with three very well attended sessions in 2022. The UEG Education Committee is always striving to broaden the depth and range of educational content. The delivery of education is also never static, and we felt that we needed to add more blended learning concepts to our portfolio.7 This led to the development of the first Masterclass on Chronic Pancreatitis which has been a great success. The second Masterclass on Colorectal Cancer is imminent, and with the ability to blend online and classroom learning with experts in the field, the offerings are taking the education we provide to the next level. In close cooperation with the UEG Young Talent Group, yet another offer was developed specifically for those colleagues who are in the early stages of their professional and academic careers: the Career Development.8 As UEG Education has developed, so has the collaboration between committees and the UEG Journal as part of the UEG family. The COVID pandemic has been a challenging time for us all, but we have also used the time to thrive in a period of adversity and to work together in different ways. Very early in the pandemic, we developed our first webinars and have since built on these to reach new audiences and make our content more available to everyone. We also moved successfully within the Education Committee to drive changes in structure and function that ultimately have led to a highly productive and inclusive environment where, with the support of the incredible UEG Secretariat, novel ideas have become reality. In such a fertile environment for new ideas, we are embarking on more collaboration with colleagues from the USA and South America. We will soon have our first webinar with Monday Night IBD, our first truly interactive basic science content, and also with South America with the development of Spanish content and mutually beneficial partnerships. We have continued our collaboration with the European Section and Board of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, mapping our content to the Blue Book European Curriculum and supporting the European examination.9 And so as my term comes to an end, it is with great pride and gratitude that I look back on the last 4 years as UEG Education Committee Chair, and nearly a decade of involvement in education in UEG. As the Oscar Wilde quote states on one of our sought-after badges, ‘You can never be overdressed or overeducated’—not quite a mantra for life, but with UEG at least you have the education covered. To find out more about our offer, visit ueg.eu/education.