2024 A.G.M.

General Assembly Meeting during EFORT Congress Hamburg

Date: Wednesday 22nd May 2024

Time: 17:30-18:30 CET

Place: EFORT Congress venue, Committee Meeting Room 2 (1st floor – B01+B02)

Minutes

1. Approval of the Agenda

Approved with a raise of hands.

2. Approval of Minutes of GA @ Bern

Approved with a raise of hands.

3. Report of the Past President, Klaus Siebenrock: 15th Congress Bern 2023

KS unable to attend in person, but provided a nice PowerPoint (below).

Summary: Bern was brilliant! Excellent scientific content & venue. People were happy. Finances are reasonable considering the country. Surprise profit of €25k.

4. Report of the President, Eleftherios Tsiridis: 16th Congress Thessaloniki 2025

Summary:-

• Date: Thursday 16th – Friday 17th October 2025
• Venue: Makedonia Palace Hotel (5 star seafront hotel and congress venue)
• Scientific programme: complete; speakers will be invited soon
• Saturday 18th October 2025: “Knee Day MAST” included in congress registration fee. I [ET] don’t want to compete with EHS, so I will not hold the usual MAST (Masterclass in Arthroplasty Surgery Thessaloniki) course in December and will add just a “Knee Day MAST” as a bonus on the Saturday following our EHS Congress. So I don’t lose the legacy of MAST, plus we add this bonus to EHS.
• We hope the Guest Speakers will be from North America

Bring your families to Thessaloniki. Cultural / historical tours. Multicultural destination with layers of civilization and a huge range of ethnicities.

5. Report of the President Elect, Fares Haddad: 17th Congress London 2027

FH: Potential collaboration between The Hip Soc (a closed society) & EHS in Stockholm 2026. Mathias Bostrom will be President and has decided to bring his meeting to Europe. No industry. Very different. Surgeons talking to surgeons. They are looking to EHS to be a partner. It will not earn money, but we will have very good interaction. Watch this space, we will keep you updated.

EHS Congress 2027: Strategy needs work. Raising the quality bar. We can keep pushing up quality.

London is unbelievably expensive. Bern was and London is much the same. In September we are running The Knee Society = a good trial for EHS. We will find an affordable venue. Next year we will try out a meeting with BHS.

As Samuel Johnson said: “If you are tired of London, you are tired of life.” London is a dream, you can get there from anywhere. Good fun. Ridiculously good social programme. Churchill War Rooms, House of Lords = some obvious ones. We are looking into it.

6. Report of the Treasurer, Martin Thaler

MT unable to attend. See PowerPoint below.

FH: Any society needs enough in the account to manage a meeting if something goes horribly wrong, and we are only just there – we are not flush with money. Let’s hope we don’t get the strategy so horribly wrong as EFORT did.

ET: We shouldn’t go under or over half a million, according to Austrian Law. I hope to increase our finances.

JCA: Webinars are expensive. The providers are. One main worry for EFORT was the digital costs… for the future perhaps it is cheaper to buy a computer and have someone put our webinars on the net. It is not so difficult to do. In your hospitals you all use zoom and you can maintain huge groups of people – in my medical school [Madrid] we gave classes to 250+ students with no problem.

ET: Good point.

Maziar Mohaddes [EHS Nat Rep for Sweden]: If it costs money, it should be generating money. Zoom is a maximum of 300 attendees for free.

Why not charge non members?

ET: Our webinars take a lot of effort.

FH: What impact do we have in between meetings?

JAE: The EHS life exists between congresses, as we have 500 attendees for congress and 400+ for webinars.

Chris Gatzka [Full Member, Germany]: Are EHS Webinars just for education, or gaining new people? As in Germany we have a lot of webinars every week.

7. Report of the Secretary General, Stanislav Bondarenko

SB unable to attend. See PowerPoint below.

ET: It’s really my wish that SB will fulfil this vision for EHS, even during wartime.

Hip International – good motivation to come to the EHS congress & have abstracts published. We spend a lot of money on Hip International.

Sending speakers: we are bombarded to send speakers everywhere, but we cannot pay every time for two speakers. We like to collaborate, but should be conscious of our expenses.

8. Report of the SciCom

LZ unable to attend. See PowerPoint below.

ET: We can advertise the slot for the SciCom, as Prof Karrholm steps down. Thanks to him.

WAC: A lot of hiccups. EHS was not invited until the last minute. We will renegotiate next time. I negotiated for a reasonable fee for service. FH & I were there. We do not share the scientific content or the financial outcome.

FH: It is a tricky society to deal with. EKS is v controlled by middle Europe, but after a few meetings with them, they will be more open to an early dialogue next time. No programme, no local presence, it was v short of being a disaster and has been redeemed only because it was financially viable in the end… but a lot of north Americans didn’t come as they didn’t trust the organisation (the PCO joined last minute, invites went out very late). The Americans will want a better deal next WAC in 2027.

9. Report of Chairman of the EduCom, Bulent Atilla

BA: Thank you. Huge responsibility and I’m lucky. The pathway has been opened by Profs Gunther [EHS SciCom, previously also EduCom] and Prof Ullmark [Past Chairman of EduCom] and the EduCom cooperates well with the ExCom and Presidents.

Fellowships

Regards next Fellowship: Some issues with Irish hosts not all responding. Not a big issue, just need to fix the dates.

We need to refine the rules of EHS Fellowships at the EduCom tomorrow.

FH: Two rounds of candidates and everyone has had a vote, so the selection process is not precise. “Who would benefit most” is not objective.

Supported meetings

Huge demand for getting support. The President has some new ideas on that, and it probably needs refining.

Partnership programme

New initiative: long lasting relationships. Like with webinars, it’s good for advertising. Keep our Nat Reps as a bridge between EHS and Nat Socs to keep them active and benefit from their knowledge and relations in their country. The president supports us on that. Nat Reps can pick up the best hip papers each year – a scientific original talk from an EHS session – to be published.

FH: BHS did a deal with AAHKS where they had mutual members exchange and you could be a member of the other society for a year quid pro quo. That opened up for a lot of new members and I can see advantages for that. I will bring a proposal.

10. EHS Hip Registry Project

JAE: ET needed a third pillar for his presidency, so I said ok, I take the challenge! I am happy to present something new. Orthowave was created 20yrs ago and I am working with the same engineers and it continues to be upgraded. We have three servers, two are for back up. No sharing. Very private. But because that was academic, it was not for everyone. So we created the superlight Orthowave. To fill in the form is only 58 seconds.

[Watch video… HERE.]

ET was at the birth of this project. We have all the different languages, including Greek! 250k entries in our database.

We are very happy if MM will be in, as he has huge experience with registries. BA is also in. Rob Nellisen of NORE is very enthusiastic.

ET: Who owns and who handles the data? Two layers of GDPR security. Basic Qs: security, financing and controlling the data.

JAE: Its all anonymous, so it is not a problem for data protection.

FH: I would struggle to make a decision on a presentation. Very nice presentation & very nice software. I don’t understand the goal and what it achieves.

JAE: We can hire a cyber security team.

MM: I’m very impressed and think this is the future, but I do see major legal issues and consent etc. I absolutely think we should look into this.

11. EHS Webinars

OMP unable to attend, but sent a very nice Video summary HERE.

13. Miscellaneous

None.