Invitation to Congress

Dear participants, dear colleagues, dear friends, dear allies!

It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in the 14th International Congress of DAS. As tradition wants it takes place in Marmaris with the Aegean and Mediterranean Sea as background. The grand, heroic background of the both seas is the setting of choice to also try to revive the historical interaction between Asian and European countries. Hopefully you will accept it so we can open the dialogue on this conference and establish partnerships for the future.

The central sterilization department (CSSD) is an essential facility services in each hospital. Hospital services cannot be maintained without quality-assured reprocessing. To ensure this, it is essential to consider the new findings.

With its focus on the further development, validation, implementation and organization of sterilization and disinfection procedures, the congress is unique and occupies his special place among international congresses. In this context the protection of employees from exposure to potential noxious substances is given the required importance. Additional, concepts of antisepsis and the prevention of healthcare associated infections are addressed as part of the multi-barrier strategy for infection prevention control (IPC). All the issues are subordinate to ensuring patient safety.

Resources saving in the implementation of IPC is a topic that is becoming increasingly important. The increase in waste volumes during the COVID-19 pandemic showed how sensitively waste volumes react to changes in behavior. There is no question, it`s possible to save resources and to reduce emissions in healthcare without jeopardizing patients. With this objective each IPC recommendation must be checked to choose the most sustainable concept with the same effectiveness and any hygiene standard must be reviewed for its potential to improve sustainability - this also generates new attention for the standard. In parallel, traditional measures with no influence on IPC must be abolished. On the congress suggestions are given.

The implementation of a holistic concept for IPC is only possible by complying with internationally accepted standards, guidelines and recommendations presented in the light of science. On the 14th congress, all problems and evidence-based solutions in the field of IPC will be discussed in detail with participation and interdisciplinary discussion of competent scientists, experts and players from Turkey in the dialog with the international community.

Raising awareness of all stakeholders of the health sector will cause the reflection of knowledge and correct practices to all healthcare institutions. For this reason, we invite everyone whose path coincides with health services to participate in the congress.


The balancing act of prevention

Prevention is the art of balancing common sense and painful experience, foresight and complicated or banal evidence, ethics and politics, the obvious and the unexpected.

Prevention is the balance of responsibility, reason, convenience, costs for which no one voluntarily accepts responsibility.

Prevention is the challenge to prevent greater harm with lesser efforts, instead of suffering its consequences and dealing with them with disproportionately greater effort.

There is no silver bullet for prevention. That makes it difficult.

Prevention has an agonizing latency with benefits that lie in the uncertain distance.
It requires conviction, patience, painstaking analysis, courage, serendipity.

Prevention is rarely spectacular. Without passionate love, its vision suffocates in futile attempt.

Unfortunately, prevention is not a profit-making stock. Its multiple paths, detours, and uncertainties provoke the clash of opinions, separating the necessary from the unnecessary, efforts made as sacrificial offerings to preserve life.

As long as the struggle is not jeopardized by pretensions of power, vain self-promotion, care-taking incompetence, it has its chance.

The opportune moment, when it’s time to take the new hurdles of progress, must not be missed.


Prof. em. Dr. med. habil. Axel Kramer
Congress president and member of the Commission for Hospital Hygiene and Infection Prevention at the Robert Koch Institute Berlin