In 2022 our Irish member VIA, Vasculitis Ireland Awareness took the initiative to organise a patient conference, the day before the 20th International Vasculitis and ANCA Workshop.

In 2024 the 21st edition of this international scientific event took place in Barcelona and given the succes of the patient conference in Dublin it was decided to organise a similar conference in Spain this year.

The American Vasculitis Foundation showed a keen interest in participating in this event and rapidly took a leading role in organizing it (thank you for this Joyce Kullman and Beth Westbrook). Dr. Maria Cid who headed up the the team organizing the scientific conference supported the idea and team (Thank you Maria). Vasculitis International managed to get the event funded (thank you CSL Vifor) and brought in the “Dublin experience” by our members VIA and Vasculitis UK (thank you Julie Power and Zoi Anastasa). And of course one of the key players in all this was our member AEVASI, the Spanish vasculitis patient organization (Thank you Carmen Moreno Herencia),

Vasculitis International created a website especially for this patient conference and if you want to know more about the program or the speakers you can still visit this website until the end of 2024.  It is available in both English and Spanish.

To make sure the Spanish vasculitis patient would be the one who benefit most from this event, we decided to make it as accessible for them as possible. This meant that most of the presentations were in Spanish. Fortunately the funding allowed us to get some online translators who translated Spanish into English and English into Spanish, “on the fly”.

We recorded all the sessions and the videos can be viewed here.

With over a hundred patients attending the conference and the reactions we got during and after the event, we can safely say that it was a very successful event.

We did not leave right after the patient conference. We attended the scientific conference and at the end of each conference day we invited three attending doctors to be our guest in a talk show called “Meet the doctors“. This way we want to give patients an impression on what happens on a conference like this, who are the doctors attending, what research are they involved in and how did they experience the conference so far. We found dr. Sebastian Sattui from Pittsburg willing to act as a talk show host and he performed this job very well. Thank you Sebastian.

All three recordings are in English and the videos can be viewed here.

Ultimately one might say that this was yet another project showing that we live up to our slogan:

Encouraging and supporting Vasculitis Patient Advocacy Groups to collaborate.

The 22nd International Vasculitis Workshop will be organized in Melbourne Australia, by prof. dr. Kitching and his team.(th