Dear guests and colleagues,

as the congress-president of the 22. International Symposium on Trauma Care, it is a personal honour to me, to cordially welcome you to Ulm / Neu-Ulm. Not only did we spend many thoughts and efforts in order to create a scientific meeting worthwhile attending, we will also try to present to you many impressions of our beautiful city and the vicinity of Ulm, the setting where we practice trauma care.

Emergency medicine as well as the organisation of rescue-activities has changed significantly during the last 40 years in Germany. For example the curriculum for the training of paramedics, the conception and inauguration of fast- responding ambulance-networks manned with emergency physicians and the integration of air- and ground- based rescue systems. From the beginning, Ulm has played a significant role in this scenery, thanks to the synergy between the University of Ulm and the Federal Armed Forces Medical Centre in Ulm. This has been proved through multiple scientific projects and publications, the conception of strategies as well as materials for the daily use and, of course, in the long tradition we have as an air-rescue centre.

Until today, it is our vision not to loose out of sight the applicability and the user- orientation of concepts and material for the rescue-services. Our scientific publications, the idea as well as the configuration of this symposium aim at this goal.

I want to thank all of my staff for the many ideas, the enormous diligence and the extraordinary creativity the whole team put into the venture of preparing Trauma Care 2009. Special thanks belong to Matthias Helm, Bjoern Hossfeld and Gerd Kremers.

To all of you, I wish inspiring and interesting days on the professional level but also on the personal level, perhaps in exploring Ulm, the surrounding cities and countryside, which I believe belong to the most enchanting parts of Germany.

Prof. Dr. med. Lorenz Lampl, Colonel
President