It is our pleasure to invite you to the First Meeting of Recognized Diabetic Foot Clinics, taking place at Hotel Novotel Brussels Airport on Saturday, November 19.

The organization of this meeting is entrusted to the Association Belge Diabète (ABD-Diabetic Foot working group) , the main topic will be: Painful Diabetic Polyneuropathy. Belgium is one of the countries where a rather good structure for diabetic foot care has been established, with at the moment 36 recognized foot clinics and a benchmarking quality control system.

In such a system a lot of problems still persist and barriers must be overcome to improve the quality of diabetic foot care.Those barriers are partly related to some pathologies that are still not well-known in diagnosis and in therapy, such as painful neuropathy, Charcot disease, etc. There are also organizational barriers and the following examples are known by many of the teams: the referral system (on the level of patients, GPs and between the different specialties), interspecialty, the reimbursement system that is not adapted, the relationship with the administrators of the hospitals,... .

Therefore the aim of our project is:

1. To organize at least 1 meeting a year and to bring members of the Recognized Diabetic Foot Clinics (RDFC) together to share their experiences;

2. To pay special attention to the less known diseases and to improve knowledge and skills regarding these diseases;

3. To identify the barriers in the overall organization, to exchange new ideas and to list the problems for discussion with the representatives of the patient organizations (VDV and ABD working groups of the DF) to improve the care for the Diabetic Foot (DF) in our country.

A questionnaire will be sent to all RDFCs in Belgium regarding their organizational problems and activities.

A discussion workshop will be organized together with skilled people working in a network of a good referral system regarding DFCs.

All RDFCs will receive an invitation to the Meeting.The meeting will be limited to 80 participants. We promote the presence of part of the team (diabetologist, surgeon, bandagists, orthesists, orthotists, prosthetists and educator or podiatrist) per center who can report back to their teams, which should lead to an improved regional referral system “tomorrow”.

We sincerely thank our sponsors - our Platinum Sponsor Eli Lilly & Co in particular - for supporting this meeting. Please visit the booths of the sponsors during the coffee break and lunch.