Dear Colleagues,

It is my great honor and pleasure to invite you to the 9th consecutive Pančevo coloproctology workshop, as well as the regular meeting of HS SLD, which will be held on Friday, September 23, 2022, starting at 9 a.m., in the Pančevo Culture Center.

At the previous Workshop, in 2019, the Lapserb project formally won the top of Serbia. Our distinguished guests, now well known to the surgeons of Serbia, accepted the challenge and together with forty of the most persistent colleagues climbed the highest peak in Serbia – Midžor, on Stara planina. In that way, we symbolically said where our place is.

For this meeting, it was difficult to come up with something “stronger” than that, and then we realized that the most powerful feature of the Lapserb project is its democracy, i.e. the willingness of our instructors, led by Professor Amjad, to go to every hospital in Serbia where there are conditions and interest in learning this type of surgery.

In the period before the outbreak of the pandemic, our Lapserb expedition was, in addition to the university clinics in Belgrade and Novi Sad, also in Valjevo, Leskovac, Užice and Senta. Enormous enthusiasm and contagiousness greater than the corona pandemic spread from Professor Amjad to most of the surgeons who had the slightest contact with him.

Today, over 30 hospitals in Serbia are included in the Lapserb project! There is no doubt that it is one of the most successful education programs in our country.

In order to show that we will continue what we started, we decided that this year, after the professional part of the Workshop, we will continue socializing with our instructors on Mount Tara and visit Jagoštica, which is known as the most remote village in Serbia, and in this way send a message that Lapserb will continue organizing workshop in every hospital in Serbia that has the desire and conditions to develop this type of surgery.

So far, data for more than 2,000 operations have been entered into the Lapserb database, which was shown at the recently held congress in Niš. It has been unequivocally shown that our results are comparable to the education project in Great Britain, which was our model. However, we are aware that our project is still at the beginning. Due to the corona virus, we have slowed down a bit in the last two years, so I hope that the 9th Pančevo workshop will give an impetus and remind us that learning never ends.

In Pančevo on September 23, and then in Tara on the 24th and 25th, the hosts will not only be surgeons from Pančevo, but all surgeons from the Lapserb community. Our guests already know this well, and that’s why they will be with us this year as well: prof. Amjad Parvaiz, prof. Aleksei Karachun, prof. Mehmet Kuzu, prof. Danilo Mišković, prof. Nuno Figueireido, with possible surprise guests.

Driven by the idea of ​​democracy, we decided to take a risk, and that this year there would be no registration fee for our workshop. With great pleasure, I invite you all to Pančevo, but also to Tara to learn and socialize.

Mladen Janić,

Workshop director