residents, promoting research, as well as editing the “Acta Anaesthesiologica Belgica”. These challenges and our contribution to important consensus meetings inspired us to achieve our goals in patient care, education and research.

Today, your Society intends to further support you in the practice of our medical specialty. We will continue to provide you with information and postgraduate learning opportunities, but we intend to do so in a much more interactive way. This site is yours: do not hesitate to submit opinions, comments and material of interest.

As you know, anesthesia is broadening its scope to perioperative medicine. This may have an important impact on our daily practice. For this reason, during the months preceding our annual meeting, we will focus on the topic: what does perioperative medicine mean for a Belgian anesthesiologist today? At our annual meeting we will try to provide you with some answers to this question.

Please note that the protocol of this multi-centric survey has been approved by the ‘Comité d’Ethique Hospitalo-Facultaire, Cliniques Saint Luc’, Brussels. The official approval can be found at the following link, as well as the protocol of the study and certificate of insurance. Personal data protection and ethics require that we obtain consent from the patients to dispose of their data. Due to the current difficult circumstances of the outbreak, and the difficulty of obtaining written consent, oral consent by the patient has been exceptionally authorized by the Ethics Committee. A guide on how to inform the patients about this can be found at the following link, in Dutch and in French. If you want to participate, we would like you to send us back a signed convention of collaboration, and a signed data transfer agreement. Please note that it is necessary to obtain approval of your local Ethics Committee before starting the study. We will be happy to provide you with all supplementary necessary document the Ethics Committee would request for approval.

The collected data will be of great help to draw the picture of OR implications in such an outbreak situation, and will be meaningful only if a maximum of cases are reported. We thank you a lot for your help in achieving this in these troubled times, and remain at your disposal for any questions or concerns regarding this survey.