Greece

To celebrate the World IBD Day of the 19th of May 2015, the Hellenic Society of Crohn’s Disease’s and Ulcerative Colitis’ patients (HELLESCC) organised the following events:

From Monday 20th of April 2015, we started our new awareness campaign "Transform the Taboo... Play with us!!!" where we invited, through our webpage and our facebook page, our members, friends and the general public to transform the toilet paper (something so much misunderstood, but absolutely essential in our daily lives) in anything they could imagine and take a selfie photo of themselves or with friends and then post in support to IBD patients to our facebook page!

On Saturday 9th of May 2015 started the Volunteering Blood Donation in order to increase the number of blood sacks in our Society's Blood Bank at the Tzaneio Hospital of Piraeus. Our Society provides with blood any IBD patient whenever needed for surgery and transfusions.

On Tuesday 19th of May 2015:
1. Volunteers visited gastro clinics at hospitals all over Greece and distributed informative leaflets on IBD to patients, patients' families and healthcare professionals.
2. At Thessaloniki (North Greece) gastroenterologist Dr Marios Katsaros gave a speech to patients about "IBD and recent developments".

Finally, on Monday 25th of May 2015, we invited IBD doctors and IBD patients at the Museum of Cycladic Arts to watch a performance by two actresses under the title "Lost in the Translation" where the gap in the communication between doctors and patients was highlighted in a humoristic and straightforward way.

After the act, the specialist on communication Ilias Galinos tried (with his presentation) to bridge the gap and offered valuable advices on how to better communication, to both doctors and patients.