It is a great pleasure to begin a two year period as AUGIS President. Firstly, I would like to publicly thank Richard Hardwick for all his time and effort during his time as President. He made huge efforts to engage with a wider audience, particularly the Spe- cialist Nurses and Allied Health Pro- fessionals and this is something AUGIS Council is determined to continue. We are soon to change our name to Association of Upper Gastrointes- tinal Surgery rather than Surgeons. This is to make it clear to everyone that we very much welcome all mem- bers of our multidisciplinary teams. But why would you want to join AUGIS? AUGIS has always provided Guidelines and produced Standards for benign and cancer patients. Even though there is little data to sup- port much of what we do, we pro- vide expert opinion for our Provision of Services documents which have been heavily referenced within the specialised commissioning services. We are continuing to work with a software company called Methods Analytics to develop The Surgical Workload Outcomes Audit Data- base (SWORD) that uses HES data and will allow you to get your benign and cancer surgery numbers at the push of a button. This information will be invaluable for your appraisals. Surgical patients are more commonly put into trials these days and AUGIS is very central to many of the tri- als and recruitment of studies. Sun- flower is perhaps the best current example where gallbladder patients will be randomised to either getting a MRCP or no MRCP before laparo- scopic cholecystectomy. We need 13500 patients over 5 years and it seems likely that the results of this study will change the way we man- age gallstone patients both in UK and around the world. We have two Surgical Specialty Leads taking these researchideasforward.Itishopedthat a third will soon be appointed, more than any other Association or Society. The trainees have transformed the old AUGISt into the new Roux Club. This group will focus on education and training as well as research. The registrar collaboratives are prov- ing to be highly effective in trial re- cruitment and are fully engaged in improving the number of surgical trials. A training weekend in March 2019 is arranged for all trainees with significant Industry support. Clinical nurse specialists and Al- lied Health Professionals are now well represented on Council. AUGIS is providing them with a platform for education as well as an envi- ronment for professional support. Our new website will allow for a social platform encouraging case discussion, blogs, and twitter for all our mem- bers. We hope it will also provide a true link with our industry partners. The Council Area Representatives will be organising local training and edu- cational meetings so that consultants, trainees, CNSs and AHPs can attend and contribute. These meetings will be organised in collaboration with local Training Programme Directors WINTER 2018 NEWSLETTER issue 28 Reports/Events/Reviews/Fellowships/Updates www.augis.org for all the up to date information PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Professor Giles Toogood for our members