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We are happy to announce that with the last bilateral cooperation agreement signed, our final Affiliated Partner, Medical University Innsbruck, from Innsbruck, Austria, is now officially a member of VASCERN.
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This Austrian Healthcare Provider, which is an Associated National Centre, will be represented by Dr. Julia Dumfarth, a cardiac surgeon working at the Center for Genetic Aortopathies / Department of Cardiac Surgery, who will bring her expertise to the Heritable Thoracic Aortic Diseases Working Group (HTAD WG). A very warm welcome to Dr. Dumfarth!
We therefore have a total of 7 Affiliated Partners (2 from Austria and 1 from Cyprus, Luxemburg, Malta, Slovenia and Spain) in addition to our 30 Healthcare Providers (HCPs) full members.
As a reminder, the designation of “Affiliated Partner” to the ERN was integrated into the ERN legal framework in order to “achieve the widest possible geographical coverage, exchange of knowledge and best practice throughout Europe.”
Affiliated Partners are named by their national governments.
There are 2 types of Affiliated Partners:
- Associated National Centres (mainly healthcare providers) for those ERNs where an EU Member State is not yet represented by a full member in the respective ERN. It establishes a link with one specific ERN.
- A National Coordination Hub which establishes at once a link with more than one Network in which a given Member State is neither represented by a full member nor by an Associated National Centre. National Coordination Hubs may especially represent a useful solution for those Member States with very small populations that need to establish such links with many ERNs at once.
For all documents related to Affiliated Partners see the ERN Board of Member States (BoMS) page here
See the complete list of VASCERN’s full Healthcare Provider members and Affiliated Partners here