Pre-congress Seminar EuGMS Athens 2020
The first pre-congress meeting of the Athens 2020 EuGMS congress took place in Athens on Saturday the 10th of November 2018. Professor Stefania Maggi, immediate past president, and I, in addition to Professor Athanase Benetos, president elect, and Professor Anastassia Kossioni, member of the Academic Board, who are also members of the Hellenic Consortium for Geriatric Medicine, represented the EuGMS and took part in the program, with well-received presentations.
The meeting was perfectly prepared and organized in a nice venue of the Hellenic Pasteur Institute in the centre of the city, very close to the venue of the 2020 congress. The global impression has been very positive. The Dean of the Athens Medical School opened the meeting. There were around 130 participants with different backgrounds (i.e. general practitioners, physical medicine and rehabilitation specialists, public health specialists, nurses, dieticians, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, psychologists). The presentations were partly in Greek and partly in English. Moreover, the quality of the presentations was is general very good and the discussions were interactive and vivid. The participation and the quality of talks of young colleagues was remarkably high. It is obvious that there is a lot of expertise in Greece around the topic of this meeting (with focus on the impact of Mediterranean diets on health outcomes and on tailored physical activity).
The hospitality of the Hellenic Consortium for Geriatric medicine was outstanding.
On the agenda of the forthcoming pre-congress meetings is a closer involvement of the countries from the Balkan region.
The proceedings of the meeting and the related editorial (currently in preparation by G. Soulis) will be published in EGM.
Our thanks go to the colleagues from the Hellenic Consortium for Geriatric Medicine and to Evi Voudiklari for their warm hospitality and an impeccable organization of this successful meeting.
Professor Mirko Petrovic, Academic Director
