Diversity of PBM Reflected in Scientific Programme

There will be something for everyone in this year’s Scientific Programme, according to Sigismond Lasocki (University Hospital Angers, France), the Chair of the Scientific Committee. “We tried to have not only a diversity of topics but also a diversity of speakers – both in terms of their home countries and in terms of their medical specialities,” says Lasocki.

 

New this year is the ‘Debates’ session on Thursday afternoon which will provide expert appraisal of two important topics: the use of intravenous iron to correct anaemia before surgery and on the use of prophylactic platelets in the intensive care unit. “These are very hot topics; so we try to look at very up-to-date questions,” Lasocki says.

 

Another new part to the programme this year is the inclusion of the ‘Back to the Future’ session where there will be a forward-looking discussion of novel medications that are currently not on the market but in clinical trials.

 

During this Friday afternoon session, Sarah Lessire (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) will talk about the potential role of Factor XIa and XIIa inhibitors for the prevention of thrombosis.

 

Lessire’s talk will be followed by Iain MacDougall (Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK) discussing how HIF prolyl-hydroxylase inhibitors can help treat people with anaemia. The session is then rounded off by Jakob Stensballe (Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark) who will highlight the use of recombinant activated factor VII for manage post-partum haemorrhage.

 

“An important purpose of the Symposium is networking,” comments Lasocki, “to bring people from different regions, from different medical backgrounds, together.” The poster sessions in particular will provide a good opportunity to network. “We will allow a good proportion of time for discussion around the posters,” Lasocki says. Although those discussions will not be possible to hold online, virtual viewers will still be able to see the data from the posters presented.

 

The Saturday morning workshop for young researchers will also offer a unique networking opportunity. The idea behind this new addition to the programme is that researchers can bring his or her idea for a research project to be discussed at the workshop and the expert panel and other attendees will work together to give ideas or advice on how the research project might be realised.

 

The ‘Guidelines’ session on Friday morning is sure to be an important highlight, according to Lasocki. “What is complicated with PBM it’s that you have a lot of different guidelines,” he notes. Practices and availability of products of course vary by country, which makes it difficult, if not impossible to develop international guidelines as there will be some elements that cannot be implemented universally.

 

Implementation is key, however, as “it’s like cooking; you may have the list of ingredients, but if you don’t have the way of cooking it, you don’t have the delicious meal that you expect at the end”.

 

Learning from each other is an important aspect of successful PBM implementation, suggests Lasocki and the ‘Looking into the Mirror’ session on Thursday morning should not be missed. Experts from the United States, Greece, Spain and South Africa will look at how PBM has been implemented in their countries and hopefully provide some useful pointers for those in attendance.

 

During the meeting Lasocki will present some ‘breaking news’, the results of the double-blind, randomised HiFIT trial. In this study, patients undergoing hip surgery were given intravenous iron and tranexamic acid in the hope that it would improve important PBM outcomes.

 

“The two key messages are that we were able to reduce the transfusion rate by 50% and its efficient when the two treatments are combined,” says Lasocki. You can hear him present the results of the HiFIT trial during the Guidelines session on Friday morning.

Watch Presentation via Virtual Platform*

*Presentations are available for registered delegates to view until end of July 2023.

Read More 2023 Symposium Highlights

Consent Management Platform by Real Cookie Banner