2011 Meeting

November 11-12, 2011 (Vancouver, BC)

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The 98th Annual Meeting of the venerable North Pacific Surgical Association will be at the internationally acclaimed luxury hotel, The Pan Pacific Hotel and Conference Centre. The meeting venue should be spectacular as this hotel is on the harbour waterfront in Vancouver, British Columbia and is part of the very upscale developments that occurred during and after the Olympics of 2010. The meeting rooms have water views and our section is isolated from the rest of the hotel complex, therefore this should bring privacy and intimacy for the participatns, their families and the corporate sponsors.

We have been able to secure high-end rooms at extreme discounts, $139.00 - $149.00, for panoramic city of harbour view rooms and discounted suites. This excellent location is juxtapositional to all the important activities within the city, including shopping on Robson Street, the Convention Centre which is next door, the Seaplane terminal, the Sea bus, Gastown, major department and botique stores, the Bill Reid Gallery and Stanley Park.

Social activities will also be interesting with organized harbour front jogging, spa and workout facilities. There is ample parking at the hotel or easy subway connections right to the hotel from the airport, making any entry to downtown Vancouver extremely easy and economical.

Our visiting professor is Dr. James Garden, Professor and Head of the University of Edinburgh, Department of Surgery. He is an extremely gifted Hepatobiliary Transplant Surgeon, a surgical historian, and has been currently president or past president of many august surgical organizations. He brings a wealth of experience, as a truly gifted public speaker and surgical innovator to the North Pacific and maintains the tradition of outstanding surgical lecturers to this 98th meeting.

This year's meeting will be a slight departure from our usual program format. We are having a symposium on complex abdominal wall reconstruction (complex ventral hernia repairt). We are going to debate the modalities of repair which will be both informative and clearly helpful to those surgeons who repair complex ventral hernias. This is meant to be factual, "how I do it", take away, messages and techniques for this difficult problem. As most surgeons experience these difficult abdominal wall reconstructions sometime in their career, this should be of interest to the vast majority of the members of the North Pacific Surgical Association.

This year we encourage members to think about inviting a non-member colleague to sign up for this year's meeting. This guest may well wish to consider membership or is intested in continuing medical educational opportunities, learning about ventral hernias or making contacts with the surgical community of the North Pacific. The intention is to swell our numbers and our interest and perhaps gain broader appeal to the surgeons of the North Pacific. I have made provisions for extra rooms at reduced rates should many guests attend.

We are also supporting a satellite symposium for pediatric surgery on Sunday morning the 13th of November. This will be organized by Dr. Robert Sawin who I am sure would have interest for members to participate in the pediatric surgical symposium. One can contact Bob Sawin for further details.

The committee members this year are myself, Dr. Neely Panton, who is organizing this symposium and some local arrangements, and Dr. Rona Cheifetz, who is organizing continued medical education credits.

Hoping to see all of you in November. It should be an extraordinarily pleasant 98th meeting.

Best personal regards,

Charles H. Scudamore, MD

ssociate Professor of Surgery

Director B.C. Liver Transplant Program

Head, Section of Hepatobiliary & Pancreatic Surgery UBC

Guest Speaker

O. James Garden, BSc, MBChB, MD, FRCS(Glas), FRCS(Ed), FRCP(Ed), FRACS(Hon), FRCPSC(Hon)

James Garden is Regius Professor of Clinical Surgery and Head of the Department of Surgery in the School of Clinical Sciences and Community Health at the University of Edinburgh. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh (1977) and trained in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Paris in hepatobiliary, pancreatic and liver transplantation surgery. He undertook the first successful liver transplant in Edinburgh in 1992 and the Scottish Liver Transplant Programme has now grown to incorporate kidney, solid pancreas and islet cell transplantation. As a specialist hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgeon over the last 22 years at the Royal Infirmary Edinburgh, his interests have extended from laparoscopic cholecystectomy to liver transplantation and are currently in the management of benign and malignant disease of the liver and bile ducts including the surgical treatment of complex bile duct injuries.

He has led significant clinical, academic and service developments in Edinburgh and nationally. He is fortunate to have a strong supporting academic surgical team which contributed to the University of Edinburgh Medical School being placed top in the UK in the 2008 research assessment exercise in hospital based clinical subjects. The surgical academic group has an outstanding record of producing clinician scientists. He has published extensively and is editor of eleven books, over 70 chapters and some 220 articles. He is past Associate Editor of the World Journal of Surgery and is current Editor-in-Chief of HPB.

He has strong interests in undergraduate and surgical education. He is Director of the MSc in Surgical Sciences which forms part of a collaborative venture with the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. This programme supports the surgical trainee through the early years of their postgraduate surgical training using a novel distance e-learning web based system. He was a Travelling Fellow and is the Honorary Secretary of the James IV Association of Surgeons. He is a Past President of the Association of Upper GI Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland and is Company Secretary of the British Journal of Surgery Society Ltd. He was Chairman of the RCSEd Quincentenary Congress in 2005 and of the 7th World Congress of the IHPBA which met in Edinburgh in September 2006.

He is a Fellow of all the Royal Colleges in Scotland and serves on Council of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. He is an honorary member of several associations including the American Surgical Association, the Society for Clinical Surgery, the German Surgical Society, the New Zealand Association of Surgeons, the British Columbia Society of Surgeons and the Eastern Surgical Society. He has honorary fellowships of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. He was appointed Surgeon to the Queen in Scotland in 2004.