European-Vascular Course 2008

The founders and organizers of the event Michael Jacobs MD (Maastricht/the Netherlands & Aachen/Germany) and Alain Branchereau MD (Marseille/France) had a great success in May 2008 at hand, when the "European Vascular Course" (from now on abbrieviated in copy to EVC) took place in Amsterdam. Despite the enormous competition from the many other cardiovascular and vascular meetings across Europe and the rest of the world in May the EVC had its best visited event in its history in 2008.


The EVC-organization had invested into continuous promotion via its website which we have created for them. We proposed the organizers to create a meaningful newsletter, containing interviews and reports, sent to more than 10000 cardiovascular physicians in a monthly frequency over a year .

Prof. Jacobs and Prof. Branchéreau engaged themselves in many promotional activities as part of the preparation for 2008, all of which contributed largely to the success in 2008.
The program has been modified, Minerva Medica Edizioni, a well established medical publisher had been selected for the reference book and for the first time the life voting involving the audience after each presentation worked extremely well.

The opportunity for active sharing of opinions has become an important feature in our times as people have the desire to express themselves. Voting for answers to important questions in medical meetings, although nothing new, had a very positive effect on the EVC 2008

The program had many highlights and to pick one of many, I think of the keynote speech of Ross Naylor, Leceister , UK:

“Managing carotid disease in the third Millenium. Time to confront some inconvenient truths”.

The participants filled the auditorium to the last seat and attentively followed his amazing discourse and quest for a regular study of vascular science with a critical sense, thus transforming own findings into best daily practice. Ross gave brilliant audiovisual presentation seasoned with good old British humor and spiced up with interesting facts about papers, some obviously leading people to false conclusions.

In my Interview before his keynote speech, Ross gave the following statement:


RN: "Carotid disease remains one of the most controversial and scientifically scrutinized conditions of all time. However despite the considerable evidence base, surgeons and interventionists have tended to selectively cite (or more commonly ignore) data from randomised trials in order to justify personal prejudices. These landmark trials, however, highlighted a number of very important issues that many would prefer not to be debated. More importantly, these ‘inconvenient truths’ do not assume lesser importance just because there is now a less invasive alternative to surgery. My aim, therefore, will be to challenge the audience to shed their ‘one size fits all’ attitude towards treating patients with carotid disease. It is my simple contention that we are treating far too many patients (with CEA and CAS) who have relatively little risk of suffering a stroke long term, while perpetuating health systems that do not offer interventions to the most vulnerable subgroups."
(Read the entire interview with Ross Naylor MD. here )
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Ross Naylor in his talk demonstrated how important it is to thoroughly study information. In the debate about surgery against less invasive treatment propelled by the interventionists, it may be necessary to be objective in order to be able to find the truth which of the available treatment of carotid artery disease is appropriate for each individual patient.

Summary:
The quality of the different vascular courses and symposia at the EVC 2008 has been exquisite, whether organized by the EVC itself or its partners from industry have been exquisite. Most of the sessions were well visited and the logistic organization very efficient. The atmosphere throughout the whole conference has been very favorable and if you look at my pictures are the prove of a great interactive event.

In 2007, the European Vascular Course took a nose dive in the number of visitors after several countries had changed legislation for sponsorships of physicians, and a few other vascular events concurred at the very same date.

However, modifications and extensive promotion, as described led to a brilliant comeback and brought the European Vascular Course 2008 back on the winning street.

Next contribution: Why the EVC continues to change to enhance its success!