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ΣΥΝΈΝΤΈΥΞΗ
Your new position as EAU Adjunct Secretary General - Education is a multitasking one. Could you please give us a brief overview? what would these be?
It is an incredible honour to be entrusted with the EAU Adjunct Secretary General – Education position. The European Association of Urology (EAU) was established in 1972 with a clear purpose - the improvement of patient care at the forefront of everything the association does. That purpose is as relevant today in 2022 as it was in 1972. And it will forever be relevant because our vocation as doctors demands it, first and foremost.
Fifty years on, the EAU membership has grown to over 19,000 although it is increasingly clear that the purpose and impact of the EAU is now global. The EAU strategy for Education 2022 – 2026 must therefore accurately reflect this purpose for which the organisation was established and in doing so, all activities related to education must be driven by the highest priority educational interventions for significant improvement of patient care and the expected impacts must be evidenced.
In 2022, improvement of patient care is not limited to curing disease, it includes both cure and holistic care for patients and their families so that they can get back to the lives they knew before it was interrupted by a urological condition. That means that there is a need for education across the spectrum/continuum of care from disease awareness, prevention, treatment, follow-up, survivorship and palliative care. The delivery of this care must be evidence-based, patient-focussed, cost-effective and data-driven towards value- based healthcare provision. By data-driven, I mean determined by or dependent on the collection & analysis of data; and by value-based healthcare, I mean it must be equitable, sustainable and with transparent use of the available resources to achieve better outcomes and experiences of care for every person.
My role involves ensuring connectivity and collaborations across the EAU and its different Offices in terms of activities relating to education to harness diverse, complementary expertise across, within and beyond the organisation; to limit unnecessary duplication of effort; and most importantly, to ensure that we are able to demonstrate the impact of educational activities
on patient outcomes and healthcare efficiency over time. Achieving these objectives will help fulfil the hopes of patients and meet their needs, as well as help realise the aspirations of urologists wherever they may be in the world.
Given your expertise, what is your opinion about the current level of education in our field? Do you think there is room for improvement?
There have been huge strides made in the quality of urological education and training in the past two decades, however there is always room for improvement. It is clear that education and training should be more evidence-based, patient-focussed, cost-effective and data-driven with the goal of making education and training scalable and more harmonised globally.
In understanding how best to harness the scale and quality of educational and training activities ongoing across the EAU, it is urgent and critical that consensus is reached on the expected impacts and that the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are explicit. Equally important is having a clear picture of where we are today (baseline). At a more fundamental level, it is important and urgent that consensus also be reached on how any Education and Training impacts our purpose of the improvement of patient care at the forefront of everything we do . It is also clear that the EAU will be much stronger and better equipped to achieve this purpose by ensuring that the people developing and disseminating education and training curricula are inclusive and truly reflect the diversity of the membership of the organisation.
As a global community of urological surgeons, by coming together around a common greater purpose, our Educational and Training Programmes can become more harmonised, even more formidable and be the truly global phenomenon we all believe it can be. And to achieve this dream, and we must for the sake of patients, their families and urologists wherever they may be around the globe, we must come together and align on PURPOSE (the improvement of patient care at the forefront of everything we do):
“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to far,
go together”
African Proverb
Tεύχος 16 | Μάρτιος - Απρίλιος 2022
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