The importance of each single human being is a concept that is nowadays increasingly recognised and respected.

Every individual wants his own needs and his own role to be acknowledged. In addition, this is true even in the presence of limited resources, and with the “demand for recognition” now also coming from more remote corners of the Earth, thereby hugely increasing the number of people with needs to be met. Accordingly, in many settings, person-centred care has emerged as a key idea, at the very heart of our efforts to take care of patients in an all-round sense.

In healthcare too, the concept of treatment planned for the single case has attracted increasing consensus, giving rise to the so-called tailored approach. This approach, which might not be seen as central to guidelines, has, nevertheless, become widespread throughout the medical field, and indeed today represents the new real trend.

We have recently come to realise that hernia surgery, our fantastic, huge, and mainly super-specialised field, in which the concept of tailored surgery has gained enormous popularity, needs a “forum” specially designed to encourage discussion and debate of particularly innovative, controversial, and topical issues. We have, therefore, decided to launch a new section, the Editor’s Corner, precisely as a means of starting discussions and encouraging exchanges of views on unresolved issues, clinical or technical. For this section, the Editor-in-Chief invites experts and readers to contribute to the discussion of the chosen topic, presenting either their own clinical/technical data or their opinions.

Each time, the contributions received will be reviewed and hopefully published in the subsequent issue of the journal.

For this first Editor’s Corner, we decided that it would be appropriate to focus on a particularly common area of daily surgical activity, so as to start a discussion that might involve a broad section of the scientific community. What better than primary unilateral uncomplicated inguinal hernia repair, which is the procedure most frequently performed in operating theatres the world over?

We have published, and were indeed involved in the realisation of the various guidelines on hernia management (EHS, IEHS, INTERNATIONAL HERNIA SURGE)—all of which constitute important and huge achievements.

Nevertheless, all guidelines, in all fields of medicine, need to be constantly implemented and also, and even more importantly, compared with real-life settings worldwide.

After all, as already indicated, the scientific approach is all about combining freedom of expression, and of ideas in particular, with serious comparison work.

We thus decided to invite advocates of different surgical repair techniques (open pure tissue, open mesh, lap, and robotic) to closely examine the recent trends in their specific areas, and at the same time to conduct an honest, “real-life” review of their own indications and results.

This invitation was sent to some very well-known experts worldwide, and we hope to see their contributions in the second issue of 2019. In the meantime, we warmly invite all our HERNIA readers to take part too, sending us your considerations and contributions in the form of original articles, systematic reviews or simple letters to the editor, to be published in the same issue.