About LICAGE

The Liver Intensive Care Group of Europe (LICAGE) was founded in 1987 by Dr JV Farman to bring together from throughout Europe workers of all disciplines involved in the peri-operative care of liver transplant recipients. The aim of the group is to foster communication and collaboration between medical and allied health care disciplines, to stimulate and share advances in the scientific understanding and clinical management of patients requiring liver transplantation.

The group holds meetings in alternate years, in different European cities. Every second or third year, LICAGE holds meetings in conjunction with the International Liver Transplantation Society (ILTS) and the European Liver and Intestinal Transplantation Association (ELITA), when the ILTS congress is in Europe. This is either as the planned LICAGE meeting or as an additional meeting.

Every second LICAGE meeting is run as a state-of-the-art course in Anaesthesia and Critical Care for Liver Transplantation. LICAGE has also developed a web-based learning resource, the Liver Transplant Anaesthesia and Critical Care Forum (LiTAC), now run collaboratively as the Anesthesia/CCM section of a redeveloped ILTS website.

Joining LICAGE: Use the Register/Log-on page of www.litac.net to join. Membership is free. Providing your details allows the society to contact you with details of meetings, courses and other educational activities, and to invite your participation if you are interested. It may also entitle you to reduced registration fees at meetings and reduced subscription rates for journals. No personal or contact information will be disclosed to any commercial organisation, and you can de-register at any time by emailing the editor.

Our goal is to improve communication between members of the international liver transplant community. Join us to be part of this network.

Meetings and courses

The group has held meetings in May or June of alternate years, in different European cities, since 1987. When the ILTS has held a meeting in Europe, about every third year, LICAGE has participated in a joint congress also involving ELITA (the European Liver and Intestinal Transplant Association). The next of these will be in Valencia, Spain in June 2011. Collaborations with other organisations have also been successful. These include the European Assocation for Study of the Liver (EASL), the International Anaesthesia Research Society, the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland, and national centres in India and South America.

We have also run very popular courses on Anaesthesia and Critical Care for Liver Transplantation in Newcastle (2005), Caen (2007) and Vienna (2009), freestanding or integrated with a scientific meeting featuring abstracts. They are intended to be comprehensive introductions for novice liver transplant anaesthesiologists, as well as refresher courses for those with more experience.

Our main 2010 meeting will be held in Pisa, Italy 23-24 September (click here for details). Note that decreasing industry support for educational meetings has made smaller specialist meetings more difficult to fund. Clinicians remain reluctant to pay the full cost of these activities, since this would more require a two-to-three-fold increase in the typical registration fee. Under the leadership of Secretary/Treasurer Claus-Georg Krenn we are building alternative sources of support, and subscription or sponsorship fees for website resources may help fund meetings in future.