Meetings and Courses

The group has held meetings in May or June of alternate years, in different European cities, since 1987. When the ILTS has held a meeting in Europe, about every third year, LICAGE has participated in a joint congress also involving ELITA (the European Liver and Intestinal Transplant Association). The next of these will be in Valencia, Spain in June 2011. Collaborations with other organisations have also been successful. These include the European Assocation for Study of the Liver (EASL), the International Anaesthesia Research Society, the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland, and national centres in India and South America.

We have also run very popular courses on Anaesthesia and Critical Care for Liver Transplantation in Newcastle (2005), Caen (2007) and Vienna (2009), freestanding or integrated with a scientific meeting featuring abstracts. They are intended to be comprehensive introductions for novice liver transplant anaesthesiologists, as well as refresher courses for those with more experience.

Our main 2010 meeting will be held in Pisa, Italy 23-24 September (click here for details). Note that decreasing industry support for educational meetings has made smaller specialist meetings more difficult to fund. Clinicians remain reluctant to pay the full cost of these activities, since this would more require a two-to-three-fold increase in the typical registration fee. Under the leadership of Secretary/Treasurer Claus-Georg Krenn we are building alternative sources of support, and subscription or sponsorship fees for website resources may help fund meetings in future.