Chairmans Report

 

Welcome to our new website, the launch of which coincided with our recent Annual Scientific Meeting - held at the Gold Coast March 5-7 2009. Great credit goes to the hard work of Ryan Smith, ABG committee member with the design and content of the website.

We hope that you will take time to update your membership details if they change for any reason. A secure PayPal link makes membership renewal very straightforward.

At our Annual General Meeting held on Sat 7th March, our 2007-9 chair Raj Jagavkar spoke of the progress that ABG has made with strategic planning, and the committee hopes that members will be able to stay more informed through regular updates and newsletters through the year. A vote of thanks was made to Raj Jagavkar for his leadership over the last two years - which saw well supported and successful meetings held in Sydney in July 2008 and at Gold Coast this year.

A vote of thanks also was made to thank Cath Beaufort for her tireless work over the last three years as ABG secretary. The committee is very fortunate that Raj and Cath will stay on this year as members to help guide us forward.

ABG serves an important educational role through its annual meetings - where we hope to showcase important advances in our field in a friendly multi-disciplinary way. A future expansion of our educational role will seek to encourage registrars and trainees from different disciplines to participate in teaching sessions run by a local faculty in conjunction with our annual meeting.

None of our activities would be possible without the enlightened support of our meeting sponsors. I would like to pay tribute to their generosity and organisational assistance to help make our meetings flourish. The support helps to sustain ABG activities and helps us to more effectively promote Brachytherapy practice and expertise in our region.

This year we thank our Diamond sponsor, Nucletron, for conducting a very successful workshop on Inverse Planning, with contributions from two of our overseas guest faculty - Greg Edmundson and A/Prof I-Chow [Joe] Hsu who led the workshop. Nucletron supported Greg Edmundson's participation and were the sponsors of our Sea World Resort dinner.

We thank our Gold sponsor, Oncura, for providing invaluable support for Dr Robert Laing's participation and also for our keynote Australian speaker A/Prof Phillip Stricker.

We thank our Silver sponsors AstraZeneca, Abbott and Hospira for their sustaining support of our meeting - for assisting with guest speakers and consumer participation.

We thank our Bronze plus sponsor Varian Medical Systems and our bronze sponsor Isodose Control. All of our sponsors helped to support Prof Juanita Crook to lead our guest faculty, who's many enlightened contributions we all so greatly enjoyed.

We look forward to seeing new and familiar faces at our 2010 Annual Scientific Meeting, to be held in Melbourne April 8th to 10th, the weekend after Easter - please mark your calendar.

Best wishes for the remainder of your year.

James MacKean
Chairman – Australasian Brachytherapy Group
March 2009