Dear colleagues,
 
It has been a real pleasure to meet you all in Athens at our society’s annual meeting 2024, which was held at the Megaron Conference Center from September 26th to 28th, 2023. We are delighted to welcome nearly 500 attendees from over 50 countries to our congress. The conference was organized by our long-term organising team around Lucie and Jakub and their team—we are happy to continue this collaboration at future events.
It has been a conference with a large variety of lectures, over 110 abstracts for oral and poster presentations, interactive workshops, and problem-based learning sessions. We are grateful for the support from our colleagues from the Hellenic Society of Anaesthesiology who not only helped us a lot to organise the well-attended ultrasound workshops. In addition, they underlined the importance of our congress by reducing the surgical programme in Greek pediatric hospitals to enable 37 national colleagues to attend the conference!
The SafeTots Initiative brought two sessions and the prospect of future even closer collaboration with ESPA to Athens. For both, we are deeply grateful.
 
The recordings of the main lectures are available for members in our video archive: https://www.euroespa.com/members-zone.
 
We appreciate the networking character of this event and hope you have all enjoyed sharing these moments during the conference, the welcome reception, and our congress dinner at the Old Tavern restaurant in Plaka, the old town of Athens with delicious food, wine, and enriching conversations.
The charity morning hike of 6 km all the way up to Lycabettus Hill during sunrise was a real success with more than 50 attendees! The funded money will serve to enable young colleagues to apply for a grant to attend our next conference in Berlin.
We hope you have all been pleased by the conference, had wonderful moments together, and returned safely home with good memories and lots of new ideas for your daily routine.
Our next conference will be held in Berlin from October 2nd until 4th 2025 and we hope to welcome you all in that vibrant capital.
We are looking forward to keeping you updated about ongoing ESPA projects and future projects in our next newsletter, but last but not least we announce the last ESPA webinar in 2024 on November 13th, 2024 and we are proud to have two excellent and worldwide known experts on board – enjoy!
 
On behalf of the ESPA Executive board,
Best regards,
 
Michael Brackhahn
ESPA President