European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress (EMCC) 2011, 23-27 September, Stockholm

Message from the President of ESTRO

Professor Vincenzo Valentini – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy


Professor Valentini, you are, in two days’ time, the President of ESTRO and you have a big responsibility of planning the meeting in May in Barcelona and it will be a terrific meeting. That will be ESTRO 31, tell us about it.

ESTRO is really pleased to welcome the participants in ESTRO 31, offering them the usual atmosphere of our meeting: be that the science, educational and friendship. Next year ESTRO tried to announce the exchange inside our meeting, offering a new track that is called the interdisciplinary track. In this track each session will address a topic in a multidisciplinary way where discipline means that the different souls of our society, clinicians, physicists, biologists, RTT, and also brachytherapy people will have topics addressed in a way that all of them can be protagonists of this change. So the interdisciplinary track is like a family track where all the different components of our society can share perspective and knowledge. Also in ESTRO 31 we try to identify the key message, that day by day we’ll try to address by symposiums, by debates, just to offer around these key topics the best scenario of knowledge and of perspective that will be available. Taking the topics of the day, like, for example, age and elderly patients, we will completely cover the problem of these topics in the whole day and they will represent some key message that we want to share also outside the meeting for the press, for our patient organisations.

What will ESTRO 31 offer for young doctors?

In Barcelona there will be a very special event for young people. We want to go to have an agreement with young people just to finalise a plan for three years what ESTRO would like to do for the young. To promote their engagement in ESTRO life, offering them services for their education; to promote their own participation in the scientific debates and also to support their professional aspects. All these points will be collected in a formal agreement in which ESTRO, in front of the young people, will declare what this will be planned. Also ESTRO will open a new frame inside its own society to guarantee the participation of young people in our life. We need the young, the young are our future, we need to be renewed by the young so we put a lot of welcome into our young people with us in ESTRO 31.

ESTRO is also organising the 2012 World Congress of Brachytherapy in Barcelona?

ESTRO 31 has really a great privilege – to run at the same time and in the same place as the World Brachytherapy meeting. People from all parts of the world involved in this very attractive, very relevant radiation therapy methodology will be there and this also will foster the possibility to announce the change between specialists that very often work close door to door but that they need also to have a common platform to explore at the best the advantages that such a very sophisticated, very tailored, very organ sparing technique like brachytherapy could provide inside our multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary environment that, like ESTRO 31, we would like to take place.