The 66th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists

I am honored to have been appointed as the Chairman of the 66th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists (JSA). I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude in greeting. The 66th Annual Meeting will be held in Kobe for the three-day period from May 30 to June 1, 2019. Although I would have preferred to invite you all to Nagoya, as we did for the 51st Annual Meeting, our numbers of the participants have increased so dramatically since then that we have decided to return to Kobe, both from the perspective of securing a suitable conference venue and because of a range of advantages in financial terms; my experience as the Treasurer of the JSA has contributed to the decision to choose Kobe as the location. I am grateful for your understanding on this issue.

The all members of the Executive Committee including me are working hard to put together an Annual Meeting that will live up to our member’s expectations. We will be inviting members to give lectures, chair discussions, and review submissions, and your help and support on every front are greatly appreciated. It is our member’s presentations that constitute the heart and soul of our academic meeting. Because of the various different aspects that must now be taken into consideration when conducting clinical research, the application procedures have become more complex, but I still look forward to hearing many excellent presentations from our membership. I hope you are all making good progress, as the deadline for submissions is Friday, November 30.

We have chosen "Professionalism" as the theme of this Annual Meeting. The work of anesthesiologists is a nonstop series of pressing decisions. Every day, we proceed by making judgements at every level: in clinical practice, the preoperative evaluation of individual patients and their perioperative management, including anesthesia and postoperative pain relief; diagnostic and therapeutic choices in intensive care and pain clinics; clinical and basic research to suggest ways of resolving the issues that arise in these situations; these and other roles of anesthesiologists in hospitals; the role of anesthesiologists in medical safety, both inside and outside hospitals; and the role and policy of the JSA as the organization responsible for anesthesiological medicine within the Japanese healthcare system. When making these decisions, views from different perspectives may come into conflict, and it is our professionalism as anesthesiologists that provides the backbone supporting the entire process of making overall decisions. I believe that comparing our professional attitudes and identifying the criteria for action on which our judgments should be based will enable us to unwaveringly make the correct decisions. At this Annual Meeting, we will consider a wide range of issues in anesthesiology from the viewpoint of professionalism, which I hope will provide us with the opportunity to think about what we should be doing and the direction in which we should be heading.

In this Annual Meeting, we are continuing the simultaneous interpretation service for overseas presenters. We are working to minimize the language barrier, and I would like to encourage participants to actively attend sessions given by presenters from other countries in order to learn the latest knowledge and take the opportunity to extend international networks of communication. The pitch contest, for which selections started at the 64th Annual Meeting and the first results were announced at the 65th, will also continue. I am very much looking forward to receiving your submissions and to hearing your presentations.