Guy Maddern 
Professor, MBBS, PhD, MS, MD, FRACS, Surgical Director, ASERNIP-S, Australia

Professor Guy Maddern is the RP Jepson Professor of Surgery at the University of Adelaide and Director of Surgery at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital. He was trained at the University of Adelaide and became a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1989. His clinical interests include the physiological impact of laparoscopic surgery, and more recently the development of techniques to manage metastatic hepatic disease. He has over 200 publications in scientific journals and has contributed to over a dozen surgical publications.

In 1996, Professor Maddern was appointed Director of the Clinical Development Research Centre, now the Basil Hetzel Institute, at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital charged with the responsibility of defining the future direction and development of research within The Queen Elizabeth Hospital campus.

In November 1997, he was appointed Surgical Director of the Australian Safety and Efficacy Register of New Interventional Procedures – Surgical (ASERNIP-S). This organization, funded by the federal government through the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, is a program designed to perform rigorous assessments on the safety and efficacy of new procedures and technologies available in surgical practice, and feed back this information to surgeons and the community.

Professor Maddern serves on the Board of INAHTA and on numerous HTA committees in Australia.

Visions for INAHTA

The role of INAHTA over the next few years will be to define itself as the overarching federation of health technology assessment organizations, but also be responsive to European initiatives and the change in South American health technology assessment. Also, we should work more closely with groups in North America that are currently not aligned with INAHTA.

Within the Asia/Pacific region, great challenges exist to support and facilitate developments as this part of the world becomes more attuned to health technology assessment.

With our new status as a World Health Organization Collaborating Center and our growing list of members, INAHTA will need to change to adapt to its more prominent, but also more diffuse, role at a global level. I trust I can help in this process.