Editor’s Letter

Dear IUGA Family,

I start this letter sharing my sincere thanks to all our readers and correspondents for encouraging us to constantly strive to improve. I am ever grateful to my amazing, committed committee, who have continued to work hard and creatively through the pandemic to ensure we have exciting, innovative content ready in time for every publication.

In this issue, we raise some questions on the controversial topic of whether or not we should do urodynamics prior to continence surgery. I look forward to Gillian Fowler and Mayank Agarwal sharing their views on this topic. I certainly have questions on when and how pre-operative urodynamics should be performed and how we get around this in settings without urodynamics.

As the adage goes, ‘prevention is better than cure.’ We focus on the need to begin pelvic floor education and management when women start planning pregnancies, with a view toward reducing the incidence of pelvic floor disorders. To this end, Cristiane Carboni and Catherine Hudson have gathered interesting videos from expert Hedwig Neels on pelvic floor rehabilitation as first-line treatment after childbirth and a panel discussion on secondary prevention of birth trauma by Chantale Dumoulin.

In our Surgical Tips and Tricks feature, Prof. Sayeba Akhter shares her posterior vaginal repair expertise. Her article in the last issue on anterior repair was so simple and informative, I look forward to picking up some tips on repairing the posterior wall.

Our board member highlight has been fascinating and inspiring, sharing passionate tales and journeys. This time we have the privilege of an audience with Suran Ramphal, our International Advisory Board member from Africa. He has worked with new Regional Advisory Bboard members and the Education Committee to plan a 4-part webinar series on urogynecology in Africa. If you missed this webinar series, you can still view the recordings in the IUGA Video Library (see www.iuga.org/resources/video-library).

Don’t forget to send us your inquiries for the new Ask Anything feature. Questions can be clinical or anything related to IUGA. In this issue we have a very interesting question, which I will let you all read!

Finally, I want to end this month’s message by acknowledging the significant work that has been done by our IUGA Managing Editor, Missy Render. She has been with us since the end of 2016, enabling our committee to run and function smoothly. She has now been deservingly promoted to Communications Manager for IUGA and we have no doubt she will do an equally wonderful job in that role. We wish her the very best as we welcome Alyssa Roushar on board.

Once again thanks everyone for your continued encouragement. We wish you all safe and happy times.

I look forward to “seeing” you all at the IUGA 46^th Virtual Annual Meeting, December 9-12, 2021. Watch out for the exiting events planned!