HNCF Director Attends Conference in Madrid

HNCF Director Professor McGurk, was invited to speak and attend a one day conference sponsored by the European and International Association of Oral and Maxillofacial surgeons in the Hospital Universitario Ramón y Cajal in Madrid.

 

It appears that German medical teams would like to follow ours and NICE’s (National Institute of Clinical Excellence) footsteps in introducing Sentinel Node Biopsy as a preferred method of investigating the neck, which would avoid additional surgical intervention.

It is possible that we, HNCF, could offer them advice on training as Germany prepares to make Sentinel Node Biopsy a more conventional form of treatment.

 

Also speaking on the day was Professor Wolf (University of Munich), who has produced a pumping machine that allows pre-tissue to be kept alive after it’s transferred around the body. This is an exceedingly novel development, and, if refined to something much more manageable, surgeons will no longer need to operate on the neck to connect the small blood vessels in a skin graft, they would simply move the tissue to the new site, connect the jaw to the pump, which would keep the graft alive for 5-6 days, until the new blood supply begins.

 

Although a brief conference, the promising developments that are continuously unravelling prove that minimally invasive solutions to head and neck surgery are within our reach.