Full Member of the Brazilian College of Surgeons and the Alcino Lázaro da Silva Award

On 6 and 7 November 2026, Uberlândia hosted the 1st Minas Gerais Surgery Congress of the Brazilian College of Surgeons (CBC). At the same congress, I took office as a Full Member of the College and saw the scientific paper I supervised take first place among the 91 submitted, receiving the Dr. Alcino Lázaro da Silva Award.

Taking office as a Full Member of the Brazilian College of Surgeons

The induction ceremony for new members of the CBC Minas Gerais Chapter took place on Saturday, 7 November, during the congress. I received the Full Member medal and, from now on, the post-nominal TCBC accompanies my name.

The Brazilian College of Surgeons was founded in Rio de Janeiro on 30 July 1929 and brings together surgeons from every surgical specialty in the country. It is the CBC that, by delegation of the Brazilian Medical Association, runs the examination for the specialist title in General Surgery. Full Member (TCBC) is the College's full membership category. To be admitted, a surgeon needs at least six years of surgical practice and a specialist title, or one of the alternatives set by the College, and the CBC reviews the candidate's curriculum. Under the bylaws, Full and Emeritus Members make up the General Assembly, the College's highest governing body, and are the only members who vote in its elections.

In the operating room, nothing changes tomorrow. What changes is the responsibility. My training as a digestive tract surgeon and general surgeon, and my practice in robotic hernia and abdominal diastasis surgery with the Da Vinci system, at UMC and Mater Dei Santa Genoveva hospitals, have been reviewed by the College itself. I now answer for that as well, before my patients in Uberlândia and the residents I train at UFU.

The Full Member certificate is published under Diplomas and Certifications, and anyone can check the membership on the College's profile page, at cbc.org.br/mg79366.

Dr. Alcino Lázaro da Silva Award: first place among 91 scientific papers

On the same day, the paper I supervised took first place among the scientific papers of the congress and received the Dr. Alcino Lázaro da Silva Award, conferred by the CBC Minas Gerais Chapter. In all, the congress received 91 papers, four of them submitted by me. Under the rules of the call for papers, the Scientific Committee chose ten of the approved papers for oral presentation; after the presentations, it ranked the top three, and only the first-placed paper receives the award.

The paper is titled Weekend admission and mortality in selected abdominal emergencies in the Minas Gerais public health system (SUS): an analysis of 88,449 episodes. We analyzed 88,449 admissions for selected abdominal emergencies in the public health system of Minas Gerais to answer one question: are patients admitted on a weekend more likely to die than those admitted on a weekday?

The question is not new. The so-called weekend effect has been studied in many countries, and the results are not the same everywhere. A 2018 meta-analysis of 19 studies of urgent or emergency surgery associated weekend admission with higher postoperative mortality. Another, from 2020, with 394,646 emergency general surgery patients, found a slightly higher risk in the United States and continental Europe, but not in the United Kingdom. For emergency laparotomy, a 2025 meta-analysis, mostly of UK data, found no difference. In Brazil, the effect has already been measured with public health system data for acute myocardial infarction, but Brazilian data on surgical emergencies remain scarce. That is the gap this study set out to address, with data from the Minas Gerais public health system.

The first author is Allan Ramos Costa, my student at the Faculty of Medicine of the Federal University of Uberlândia, whom I supervised from study design to presentation, together with Geovanna Ramos Santos and Gustavo Henrique de Lima e Silva. Teaching at UFU is the part of my work that pays off the longest. Watching a student walk up on stage and receive this award is the proof.

Who Professor Alcino Lázaro da Silva was

Alcino Lázaro da Silva (1936–2022) was a full professor and Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Medicine of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and served as president of the Brazilian College of Digestive Surgery. In the late 1960s, he created a technique to repair large incisional hernias with the patient's own tissue: the hernia sac and the aponeurosis, transposed in layers, without mesh. First published in 1971, it became known as the Lázaro da Silva technique, reached the international literature in 1979 and is still used and studied in Brazil, in selected cases where mesh is not the best option.

The name of the award carries extra weight for me. Hernias are what I operate on every week in Uberlândia, and the incisional hernia, the very one Professor Alcino taught surgeons to repair, I now operate on with robotic or open surgery.

Thank you

I thank the CBC Minas Gerais Chapter, the congress Scientific Committee, the co-authors of the paper and the colleagues who were on stage and in the audience.

Dr. Solon Gonçalves is a digestive tract surgeon (RQE 60355) and general surgeon (RQE 44656), CRM MG 79366, a Full Member of the Brazilian College of Surgeons (TCBC), certified in robotic surgery by Intuitive and by Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein. He is a Professor of Surgery at the Faculty of Medicine of the Federal University of Uberlândia and practices in Uberlândia, MG, Brazil, with a focus on robotic surgery for hernias, abdominal diastasis and oncologic surgery of the digestive tract.