1. Each course has a course director who formulates the programme, submits the course and is responsible for the delivery of the programme.
2. The course director must obtain written or email agreement of all speakers before submission of the abstract and include a valid email address for each speaker (one single e-mail address per faculty members).
3. As part of their acceptance, all speakers must confirm that they have not accepted invitations to participate in more than four courses submitted to the Congress.
4. Each person can be a director of a maximum of 2 submitted courses. Each person can be a speaker or director in a maximum of 4 submitted courses. The selection committee reserves the right to grant an individual a larger number of courses based on its specific added value to the Congress scientific content (e.g. prerequisite courses related to Surgical Skill Labs).
5. The duration of all courses for 2027 will be 90 minutes.
6. There must be a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 6 faculty members (and the course leader is consider as one of the faculty members).
7. Use a concise, scientific title for your Instructional Course abstract. Please ensure that neither the session title nor any presentation title includes the name of a company or product. To comply with UEMS accreditation requirements, submissions containing company or product names in the title or programme will be automatically rejected.
8. A declaration of interest for each faculty member needs to be included; specifically you must indicate whether the course leader or any of the faculty members has a financial interest in the subject matter or receives funds from any mentioned company.
9. The course leader must be present throughout the full duration of the course and the faculty members should be present for as much of the course as possible.
10. If your course is accepted, you will be given a date and time for presentation. It is not possible to cancel an accepted course. Courses take place on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday of the Annual Congress.
11. Instructional Course faculty who fail to turn up or arrange replacement speakers, will not be permitted to present in courses at future ESCRS Congresses.
12. All submissions are reviewed by 3 independent reviewers. A sub-group of the education committee reviews all courses to pre-select for final approval by the entire committee.
13. ESCRS receives many more submissions than can be accepted, almost one third of the submitted ICC will be successfully selected.
14. If a course has been accepted for one or more years, it does not necessarily mean it will be accepted in the future.
15. The factors and criteria for successful submission and ICC acceptance are:

• Topic of interest – we attempt to have most topics of interest covered by courses, trying to avoid having repetition of the same topic.
• Level of the course stated – basic/advanced.
• If held previously – number of participants (taking into account the day and time at Congress), and the evaluation scores.
• Compliance with UEMS accreditation requirements.
• Selected topics as identified by the education committee may result in courses to be invited if no submissions have been received on those topics.
• Prerequisite courses coupled to surgical skills labs may stand a higher chance of acceptance.
• Courses with international faculty from different countries have a higher chance of acceptance (clinically active country).
• Courses on a single product stand a lower chance of acceptance.
• Courses that are novel and have not yet been held may stand a higher chance of acceptance.
• Aim to have a good faculty gender balance.
• The abstract should be as complete and informative as possible within the word count limit; one-line submissions are unlikely to be successful.
• Courses on behalf of uninvited European/National/International societies may not stand a higher chance of acceptance.

The ESCRS selection committee grants itself the right to select the most appropriate courses to guarantee a large coverage of educational topics during the Congress even if this selection results in a higher number one faculty may be involved than allowed.