UEMS Section & Board of Paediatric Surgery – a historical perspective

The UEMS Section and Board of Paediatric Surgery was founded more than 40 years ago. Since then major activities have been related to the improvement of quality of care of Paediatric Surgery in Europe. Remarkable success was achieved in the development of Paediatric Surgery as an independent speciality all over Europe. Other major successful activities of the UEMS Section and Board of Paediatric Surgery consisted of the development of a high-quality European examination and delineating a minimal common standard in paediatric surgery training in the form of European Training Requirements (ETR). Recommendations drawn from examination experience support that candidates who achieve weaker passes in part 1 may wish to consider more practice before attempting part 2 due to the weak correlation between the two scores. It may be helpful for candidates to consider having some experience working in an English-speaking clinical setting, if not truly fluent in English, in order to improve their chances of being successful in the part 2 exam. Other achievements of the Section were accreditation of the training centres in Europe and European Census in Paediatric Surgery project. All the aforementioned activities led to standardization and harmonization of Paediatric Surgery, as well as contributed to increasing quality of paediatric surgical service throughout Europe