The Membership Committee shall consider all applications for membership and report its recommendations to the Executive Committee and the Governing Council (Board of Directors) of the World Society. The Membership Committee is responsible for researching pertinent information on a specific candidate. However, it shall be the responsibility of the candidate for membership to ensure that all pertinent information needed for the application reaches the World Society offices. The Membership Committee also shall oversee the recruitment of new members. The Membership Committee shall be composed of one to two members per continent in addition to the President and the Secretary of the World Society. The Chair of the Membership Committee shall be designated by the President and approved by the Executive Committee.
Chair
Kirsten Finucane, Auckland, New Zealand
The 3rd Scientific Meeting of our Society held in Istanbul June 23-26, 2011 was a great success and was attended by a total of 631 colleagues from all over the world. The Postgraduate Course on the functionally univentricular heart had a great number of excellent presentations and was dedicated to Francis Fontan and Guillermo Kreutzer, both attending the meeting. The Stella Van Praagh Lecture on the anatomy of the functionally univentricular heart was ably delivered by James Wilkinson from Australia and Robin Kinsley from South Africa delivered a moving Castaneda Lecture on the plight of children with congenital heart disease in Africa. We would like to thank all the presenters of abstracts and posters and all the attendees for their enthusiastic participation. Many thanks also go to the Local Host and Chairman of the Program Committee, Sertac Cicek, to the Chairman of the Postgraduate Course, Constantine Mavroudis and to the entire Program Committee for their tireless work. The spectacular venue of the meeting, the perfect organization, together with the very high quality of the scientific sessions have proven, one more time, the huge success of our Society.
The Istanbul meeting was truly historic for several reasons. After the first Scientific Meeting in Washington (2007), and the second in Cairns (2009), Istanbul will be remembered as the first “independent” meeting of our Society. Istanbul was also the first large Scientific Meeting of the World Society coming together with our new World Journal for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Surgery, which held its Annual Editorial Board meeting and which will publish the best oral and poster presentations in the near future. The World Journal, ably led by its Editor in Chief, Marshall Jacobs, is the only scientific journal specifically dedicated to pediatric and congenital heart surgery and is currently distributed in 77 countries. Finally, the Istanbul meeting witnessed the first renewal in the leadership of the World Society since its establishment 5 years ago. The new Officers and a renewed Governing Council will lead the World Society into the future.