Russia has an area of about 17 million square kilometers and situated both in Europe and Asia. It makes Russia the largest country in the world. More than 100 ethnic groups live in Russia and numbers 142.9 million citizens. Russian is the official language of Russia and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. In addition to 144 million native speakers Russian is also the secondary language of 114 million people all over the world. The surgery in Russia run parallels that of surgery in continental Europe. The first Russian manual on surgery was published by Prof. I. Bush in 1807. The glorious chapters of history of surgery in Russia content the name of Nikolay Pirogov (1810-1881) who was a great scientist and outstanding organizer of field surgery, he pioneered Ether narcosis in the battlefield in 1847; Vladimir Demikhov (1916 –1998) was an organ transplant pioneer, who did several transplantations in the 1930s and 1950s, such as the transplantation of a heart into an animal and a lung-heart replacement in an animal. His monograph "Experimental transplantation of vital organs" (1960) later published in 1962 in New York, Berlin and Madrid, became the world's first monograph on transplantology; Pavel Androsov (1906 – 1969) was an inventor of several stapler devices. Coloproctology was established as a licensed speciality in 1988, though first specialized proctology department appeared in USSR 1946 and in 1962 there were 15 specialized coloproctology units. Nowadays every region of Russia has coloproctology care departments. The Russian Association of Coloproctologists was founded on October 3, 1991. Currently it has more than 1200 members. The web page can be reached at this link The official journal of the Association is „Колопроктология”. The national congress of coloproctologists is organized annually. The current president of the Russian Association of Coloproctologists is Prof. Yury Shelygin (
Achievements:
Currently, we developed National Guidelines for all colorectal diseases and most of them have already been approved by the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation.
Reference centers for pathomorphology and diagnostics (CT,MRI,UC, endoscopy) have been established and successfully operated on Ryzhikh National Medical Research Center of Coloproctology base.
Every year the Russian scientific societies organise meetings with the aim of improving specialists qualification. Every month we demonstrate live surgery with feedback for another hospitals.
Our national journal “Coloproctologia” is already in the Scopus data base.
Future plans:
It is planned to continue trips to various regions of the country in order to assess the quality of the coloproctological care provided to our patients. One of the tasks is to extend mini invasive and organ saving surgery to the national level. We support surgeon activities in the Russian and European coloproctology association meetings.
We are continuing to develop a national colorectal cancer registry and IBD Registry.