24 WORLD GASTROENTEROLOGY NEWS OCTOBER 2017 Editorial | Expert Point of View | WCOG at ACG 2017 | WDHD News | WGO & WGOF News | WGO Global Guidelines | Calendar of Events WGO Guidelines Program: An Interview with Professor Guido Tytgat e-WGN spoke with Professor G.N.J. Tytgat at his home in Amsterdam. Guido Tytgat is admired by many, being called the Lion of Flanders, and a great man who pioneered academic and clinical gastroenterol-ogy in the Netherlands and Europe. He started the WGO Guidelines program after taking over the leader-ship from Professor Meinhard Classen in March 2002 when he became the tenth WGO President. In September 2005, he was succeeded by Professor Eamonn Quigley. Key ideas from the interview include: • For the World Gastroenterology Organisation, one of the most important “raisons d’être” is its re-sponsibility in education, teaching and training. • We have gone a long way from the first very simple guidelines to what we have now, but we have not reached the end point yet. • Global guidelines with cascades are an absolute necessity – many ‘gold standard’ or Western guidelines are incompatible and thus useless in many, if not most, clinical settings around the world. In addition, there is chaos now with too many conflicting recommendations, versions and languages. Compare this with the work of airline pilots: they use the same guidelines and communicate in one language. • Diseases and infections are globalizing due to traveling and migration of populations, another (quickly) expanding reason why guidelines must be global. • We need to involve national societies more in getting their best regional experts on our guidelines development teams. • Evidence Based Medicine guide-lines are the best way to go but, considering the cost and limits related to EBM, we do the best we can with our current methodology, and I believe the outcome would generally not be different. • The work of the Rome Foundation is a good model for developing universal global standards, and for getting them accepted. • There should be a solution for the total chaos in disease grad-ing systems all over the world. WGO could possibly play a role in preventing this enormous loss of resources and help develop a universal disease grading system for instance for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. It surely was my idea to initiate the guidelines program. In 2002, the sitting council asked me if I was interested to join WGO and I replied yes, but I was so busy with gastroenterology in Am-sterdam, which then was and still is the number one institution in Europe, so I only wanted to do it if I could have a certain contribution: I wanted to devel-op clinical guidelines, I was absolutely convinced of the value for the organiza- Global guidelines with cascades are an absolute necessity – many ‘gold standard’ or Western guidelines are incompatible and thus useless in many, if not most, clinical settings around the world. Guido’s master class in the unit of prof. K.L. Goh at the University of Malaya, 4-5 March 2003 There was an enormous gap between medical care and medical knowledge in developing countries compared with the developed world.
ewgn-vol22-issue2-FINAL
To see the actual publication please follow the link above