• Belgian Association for Ambulatory Surgery (BAAS)
• Belgian Association for Cardio-thoracic Surgery (BACTS)
• Belgian Association for Pediatric Surgery (BELAPS)
• Belgian Association of Surgical Trainees (BAST)
• Belgian Group for Endoscopic Surgery (BGES)
• Belgian Section of the International College of Surgeons (BSICS)
• Belgian Society for Surgical Oncology (BSSO)
• Belgian Society for Vascular Surgery (BSVS)
• Belgian Trauma Society (BTS)
• Belgian Professional Surgical Association (BPSA)
• Royal Belgian Society for Surgery (RBSS)

Belsurg and the Belgian Surgical Internet Committee

All 11 scientific surgical Societies in Belgium (see list above) have now agreed to create and develop a common website. To realize this objective, a new Committee was founded, the Belgian Surgical Internet Committee (BESIC) vzw / asbl.
Every participating Society has one representative in this Committee. The bylaws, prepared by this Committee over the past year, were officially signed and the first Board was elected amongst the representatives of the three founding Societies (RBSS, PUBS, and BAST) on Saturday, 5 May 2001 at the closure of the Second Belgian Surgical Week in Knokke (Figure).

The interactive website has been developed by a professional company (Lodestar, Creative Computer Solutions, B-9000 Gent) under the guidance of BESIC. This project has been made possible with the major financial support of Bristol-Meyers Squibb.

The main objectives of this joint project are:

• to develop a common interactive surgical website in Belgium
• to help individual societies in promoting their organization/committees
• to decrease the cost for individual societies in developing their own website
• to announce interesting events/meetings to all surgeons
• to create a database with contact addresses including all surgeons
• to publish the Acta Chirurgica Belgica online
• to offer an individual, password-protected homepage for every surgeon
• to offer a common toolkit for all societies to create documents
• to offer a forum for discussion amongst surgeons
• to offer a product forum for sponsors
• to offer interesting links to other websites

Possible future developments are experts' techniques, photo gallery, video gallery, clinical trials, outcomes and databases, job opportunities, surgical quiz, etc.

We hope that this project will reunite the Belgian Surgical Community and that www.belsurg.org will be one of your favourite bookmarks in the near future. Please do not hesitate to contact the BELSURG webmaster.