SATS News

In Turku, 04 February 2008

Dear friends!

I am writing this letter to you just before leaving for the Geilo meeting. I want to emphasize of the great importance of this annual event to the thoracic surgery of Scandinavian centres. If we try to maintain a certain standard of academic research in cardiac surgery, we need to do clinical and experimental surgery and we need a podium to present our data. Of course there are thousands of meetings in surgical world but the Geilo meeting is just the right place for the Nordic collaboration. I hope that also our Swedish colleagues could find their way to the Norwegian mountains. In addition to the scientific contribution, it is a lot of fun.

If we stay in the meetings, I would like to thank Jorma Sipponen and his team for an excellent job while organizing the annual SATS meeting last year in August in Helsinki. All the elements of a wonderful event were fulfilled in perfect manner: scientific program, social events, and the number of attendants (nearly 400) and of course the support of industry. We are looking forward to meeting this year in Copenhagen,

 In the letter last summer I wanted to wake up the Finnish and Danish national societies in the membership issue. Now I am very glad to announce that the Finnish national society has made the decision: all the members of the national society also are members of SATS.  I just hope that our Danish friends could do the same in the next future. It would be so much easier for all of us.

As you well know our annual meetings are organized as a joint meeting together with SCANSECT. The representatives of their organization wanted to talk about the future of the meetings and about better collaboration. We had a short session in Kastrup airport in the beginning of December and have planned the future; how can we do some things better and especially our annual meetings more attractive for the attendants. In Helsinki we also had discussion with the representatives of the cardiothoracic centres of Baltic countries and have done some plans for the collaboration. If we want to have colleagues from those countries to be members of the SATS we need to do some changes in our constitutions. The issue will be taken care in general assembly in Copenhagen.

There are some practical issues to mention. The economy of the society is on healthy basis; the Helsinki meeting left a nice surplus to divide in three equal parts: SATS, SCANSECT and local organizing committee. We would be very grateful for the suggestions to improve our websites; don’t hesitate to contact the webmaster Keijo Leivo or me. I also highly welcome all proposals to improve the activities of the association. Just now the future of SATS looks bright but we want to do it even better. I wish you all a pleasant year 2008

Timo Savunen, Secretary General