Dear Colleagues

We have some cause for optimism in today’s newsletter as governments across Europe and America loosen restrictions on the movements of their citizens and our colleagues make plans to open their practices for elective surgery and routine patient visits.

Of course, as we hear from Roberto Bellucci, Jesper Hjortdal and Jose Guell our practices are greatly transformed with social distancing, PPE and COVID-19 checks. It will take some time for these processes to become routine and many patients remain reluctant to attend the clinic. Hopefully antibody tests like the one described here will become widely available and make all of us more comfortable in all our activities.

Jose Guell explains how he has become an advocate for remote communications and telemedicine over the last two months. He believes it is the way for the future. Most certainly we will have a greater use of telemedicine for screening and perhaps diagnostics although as Roberto Belluci has highlighted, we do not have legal clarity on this activity.

We also report today on the remaining results of our COVID-19 questionnaire. The results in full will be published in the June issue of EuroTimes and on our website www.eurotimes.org.

Rudy Nuijts
Prof. dr Rudy MMA Nuijts
ESCRS President