BAUS 2024 Birmingham

It is hard to believe that this BAUS Annual Meeting will be my Presidential “swan-song”.  The President’s Address will be an opportunity to thank all of you who have trusted and supported me over the last two years, and it will be my great honour to present the BAUS President’s Badge to Prof Ian Pearce who will take over for the next two years.

I will also be delighted to present our Medals and Awards to an inspirational and talented group of BAUS members and international leaders. It’s always a tough ask our awards committee to select from such a high calibre field – I am sure you will agree that all are very well-deserved. It is my honour to bestow the medals to an outstanding group of colleagues. Congratulations to Shamim Khan, Sanjay Kulkarni, Suzie Venn, Hashim Ahmed, Jean McDonald & Rob Feasey. Come along to congratulate all our inspiring recipients at the BAUS Welcome Drinks Reception in the Exhibition Hall on Monday evening.

One of the very few drawbacks of being President, is that I often don’t have time to participate fully in the Annual Meeting as a BAUS member because, as you can imagine, our annual get-together is a great opportunity to schedule lots of meetings and workshops whilst we are all together. This year’s program is packed with sessions that are “must see” as far as I am concerned. I may have to use outgoing President’s privilege to excuse myself from some of my duties to join the audience.

I congratulate Joe Phillip (Honorary Secretary) and Mo Belal (Honorary Secretary Elect) along with Harry Heald (Events Manager) and Chloe Austin (Events Assistant), for delivering an incredible program. For any of you who have not yet organised a conference program, this represents a huge amount of work. Thank you to all our Section teams and partners for contributing to the program development, and to all our speakers who put so much effort into their presentations. Remember all of this is impossible without two groups of very important people.

• members of BAUS who input lively interaction and networking. I hope you will agree that this membership benefit is well worth your continued support to BAUS; and
• our amazing sponsors and partners who contribute so much to this successful meeting each year.

There is so much to digest in this program, I suggest you spend some time taking it all in. Clinical and technical innovation for every aspect of our work. Some of which is for us to marvel at, in the hands of the subspecialist and, perhaps more importantly, updates in techniques and knowledge for the general urologist. Specialty section sessions include both of these, and the BAUS Updates round-up at the end of the meeting will bring it all together for you. In an unselected non-elective on-call or general urology clinic, we are all generalists and I look forward to brushing up my clinical knowledge to benefit my patients.

Alongside our clinical focus, the annual meeting is an opportunity to highlight and debate some of the political hot topics pf the year. At our opening session, we welcome the Presidents of each of the four Royal Colleges of Great Britain and Ireland. We have selected four controversial topics that none of you could have missed in the media. Each President has courageously accepted an invitation to share their thoughts on topics that have vexed clinical leaders over the last twelve months. I know you all have a lot to say on these matters, so make sure you get to Birmingham in time to join the conversation. Our BAUS, BJUI and JCU Guest Lectures provide insights from elite sports, industry and the highest levels of NHS leadership. Is there any similarity between delivering high performance clinical care year after year, and performing at a world class level in sports? Join us to hear what Olympian, Colin Jackson has to say, and learn first-hand about being a patient and its impact on the life of a professional athlete from John Hartson.

We also have plenty of sessions highlighting the wellbeing of clinicians and managing ourselves/our workload in a testing healthcare environment. Only the Annual Meeting can offer the forum to bring us all together to share experiences and practice. A problem shared is a problem halved? Perhaps not, but never underestimate the value of conversations between peers, and the knowledge that you are not alone in facing challenges. Surely this is what Our BAUS community and all of our regional societies are all about.

Great to see BSoT highlighting some issues that are relevant to us all - the challenges we face are technical, personal, inter-personal and affect our wellbeing. Freedom to speak up will also be explored, from all perspectives. And who better than the Consultants of the future, to lead the exploration of the impact of Artificial Intelligence? BURST will also have a strong presence, highlighting their portfolio of ongoing research work. I am delighted that, once again, we can showcase the best papers from trainees representing every region in our TUF-BAUS Best Regional Paper session. Come along to support your regional champions. Thank you to TUF for sponsoring and providing a prize for the overall champion.

A final message to you all, is that we really do welcome suggestions for sessions at our Annual Scientific Meeting for 2025. Please do talk with Joe Philip, Mo Belal and Ian Pearce early if you have ideas. The program is often fairly well developed by September for the following June.

Looking forward to seeing you all in Birmingham, to celebrate and debate all that is UK Urology.