Two consultant surgeons from Bucharest’s principal children’s hospital, Maria Sklodowska Curie and another from Sf Maria Emergency Children’s hospital, Iasi are to make an educational, observational tour of three leading UK children’s hospitals, spending a day at each: Southampton University Hospital, Kings College Hospital, London and the Leicester Royal Infirmary. The trip to the UK will also encompass a visit to the ostomy manufacturing company, Welland Medical in Crawley West Sussex. The Romanian surgeons will also have the opportunity of speaking with the past and current President of the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons.

Furthermore, the three surgeons will meet and speak with the chairperson and other trustees from the charity, The Breakaway Foundation, the organisation that supports children, young people and their families with bowel and/or bladder diversions and dysfunction leading to the formation of a stoma*; ileostomy, colostomy or urostomy.

This all important fact finding trip is sponsored by the Romanian Ostomy Patients’ Support Foundation (ROPSF) a charity, its origins dating back to 1995. ROPSF has been working in Romania with the aim of helping Romanians who have had to undergo major abdominal surgery, often for cancer of the bowel or similar bowel, rectal and urinary illnesses return to as normal life style as possible.

It has been through recent ROPSF contact with several Romanian children’s hospitals that a need for closer co-operation has been sought and established. In 2015 ROPSF sponsored three UK paediatric consultants and three specialist nurses to speak at the 7<sup>th</sup> National Paediatric Congress in Bucharest – a most successful event.