ERA-EDTA—a dynamic association moving forward
Professor of Medicine, ERA-EDTA President (2005–2008) Bone and Mineral Research Unit, Hospital Universitario Central de Asturias, Oviedo 33006, Spain
Correspondence and offprint requests to: Jorge B. Cannata-Andía, Bone and Mineral Research Unit, Hospital Universitario Central de Asturias, Julián Clavería S/N, Oviedo 33006, Spain.
The ERA-EDTA was founded as EDTA in 1964. This occurred 14 years after the first renal transplants were performed in Paris and Boston, and 4 years after dialysis had embarked on its path towards becoming the current long-term replacement therapy for end-stage chronic kidney disease. The first meeting of the Association was held in Amsterdam and it gathered 210 delegates coming from 16 different countries, the first volume of the EDTA Proceedings being published the same year. During the following 4 years, the Congress and the Proceedings were the main activities of the Association, until the EDTA Registry was founded in Dublin in June 1968.
After this successful beginning, the Association continued its growth and expansion. In 1985 the Nephrology Dialysis and Transplantation journal (NDT) replaced the EDTA Proceedings and in 1995 the present name "European Renal Association-European Dialysis and Transplant Association" (ERA-EDTA) was adopted. All the previously mentioned changes took place during the first 35 years of the Association, and they were only possible because of the efforts of a great number of ERA-EDTA officers, councillors and staff. They allowed the ERA-EDTA to reach this new century with the basic structure and the necessary economical support to initiate the challenging activities centred around education and research in which the Association is now involved.
I have had the privilege to participate in this progressive transformation of the Association, in the 1990s as Ordinary Council Member, and more recently as Secretary-Treasurer and President of the ERA-EDTA. I am proud of the achievements the Association has reached, and, on behalf of the ERA-EDTA Council, I would thus like to share with all ERA-EDTA members and NDT readers some of the most important changes that have taken place in the last few years.
The ERA-EDTA Congress has experienced a progressive growth, from 4574 participants in Nice in 2000 to 6836 in Stockholm in 2008, reaching at the same time a high scientific level and increasing homogeneity in the structure and contents of the Congress. This has been greatly due to our decision to select for each Congress a new and specialized scientific committee under the leadership of highly respected and very active chairpersons. This decision has also allowed us to successfully adopt, in almost all of our symposia, the formula ‘from the bed to the benchside’, or vice versa, in which we have been able not only to integrate clinical and basic aspects of the medical science but also to attract new young scientists to the ERA-EDTA. As a result, we have managed to increase the number of submitted abstracts in basic science and translational medicine up to 20%, similar to the percentages received in clinical nephrology, hypertension, dialysis and transplantation. This adequate balance among the main areas of kidney disease and its related disorders has increased the interest of the nephrological community that considers our Annual Meeting a prestigious and useful congress, offering a complete and top-level educational and research programme.
In 1999, the ERA-EDTA Registry also experienced another great renovation and returned to Amsterdam, starting a fruitful collaboration with the Department of Epidemiology and Informatics of the Academic Medical Centre. Today, the ERA-EDTA Registry has not only recovered its excellent capacity for collecting very important European data in renal replacement therapy, but is also making valuable contributions in the field of clinical epidemiology, through the educational courses, publications and several other initiatives designed to improve the quality of renal care and clinical outcomes in CKD in Europe. A good example is the QUEST initiative that crystallized into NephroQUEST, an ERA-EDTA Registry research project, funded by the Commission of the European Union since 2007.
Another aspect that has been of paramount importance for the ERA-EDTA Council has been the educational activities, which experienced a remarkable increase from 4 courses organized per year in 2002 to the 29 courses programmed for 2008. In a recent enquiry, ERA-EDTA members conveyed that these educational courses have been highly appreciated. Due to this success, the goals and aims of the courses have been expanded. As a result, we now offer a wide range of topics for nephrologists and basic scientists, including fundamental, epidemiological and translational courses, held in more than 20 countries, and covering almost the whole spectrum of kidney disease and related disorders.
The promotion of research and stimulation of young investigators have also been matters of high priority for the ERA-EDTA Council. Consequently, in 2006 we launched the ERA-EDTA Long- and Short-Term Fellowship Programme that has been extremely successful. We have already awarded, in the first 2 years of the programme, 17 long-term and 17 short-term fellowships to candidates coming from 18 different European countries, who will work in clinical and experimental projects.
Moving forward in the same line, in the ERA-EDTA 2008 Stockholm Opening Ceremony, I had the pleasure to announce the beginning of the ‘ERA-EDTA Research and Formation Programme’, a newly branded initiative of the Association designed to contribute to the establishment and set-up of stable and high-level European networks of clinical, epidemiological and translational research. This ambitious programme will start this year, and we hope it will have a great and positive impact on the progress of the CKD research networks in Europe.
This remarkable increase in the ERA-EDTA activities has resulted in the necessity for competent advice in many different areas. To cover this need, in 2005 the ERA-EDTA decided to create different external advisory boards. So far, in the last years, three advisory boards have already been set up: the Scientific Advisory Board, which helped us to run the Fellowship Programme and which will play a key role in running the ERA-EDTA Research Programme in the near future, the Ethics Committee, created to advise the ERA-EDTA Council on ethical and managerial matters, and, more recently, the European Renal Best Practice (ERBP) Advisory Board, which has already successfully started work with the aim of reviewing the role of guidelines, consensus conferences and recommendations in clinical practice.
When the ERA-EDTA decided to commence work on all these challenging initiatives, we were aware of the need for a more efficient, rapid and interactive way to communicate with the members of the Association. Until 2002, there were only two main lines of contact with the ERA-EDTA members and the nephrological community; in the scientific field, we had our main journal, NDT, while all other matters were covered by the ERA-EDTA Annual Report. To allow more efficient growth and to increase the interaction with the ERA-EDTA members, we have introduced several changes.
Our main journal, NDT, has progressively increased the number of readers worldwide and raised its scientific impact factor as well. To move forward, we considered that ERA-EDTA Educational and Formation activities should also have a broader channel of transmission; thus, we decided to create a new journal, ‘NDT Plus’, which has already published its first issue at the beginning of 2008. We also considered that the Annual Reports, the Opening Ceremonies and the General Assemblies were clearly insufficient to pass to the ERA-EDTA members and the nephrological community the amount of news, activities and general information that our high level of activity currently produces. Progress in the technology of communications helped us to design modern tools to improve our communication. The first initiative was ‘NDT-Educational for Kidney and Blood Pressure Related Disorders’, launched in 2002, which has played an extremely successful role in education. A good example of the worldwide acceptance of ‘NDT-Educational’ is the fact that in the first half of 2008, the average number of visits per month was 43 270, coming from 25 different countries.
To complement this initiative, in 2005 the ERA-EDTA created ‘Follow us’, which was originally a quarterly journal but has recently increased its frequency to one issue every 6 weeks. ‘Follow us’ has been extremely useful in delivering information about the many different ERA-EDTA activities, supplementing what the ‘Registry Newsletter’ had been doing in the same spirit, but focussing on the ERA-EDTA Registry activities.
In this short document, I have tried to highlight what, in my opinion, has led to the recent success of the ERA-EDTA. It is impossible to include in this summary the names of all those who have made all these improvements possible. However, I want to emphasize that behind all these achievements, a great number of people generously offer their creativity, enthusiasm and time on behalf of the Association with the aim of moving forward in nephrology. I feel proud and honoured to have had the opportunity to lead the Association during the past 3 years, in a period in which important changes have taken place and so much progress has been made. The story started in 1964, thanks to pioneer nephrologists who envisioned a dream, and 44 years later, high recognition for its human, scientific, educational and professional contribution has been achieved.
Received for publication: 17. 6.08
Accepted in revised form: 14. 7.08
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