Committee Spotlight: Postgraduate Education Committee

May 11, 2017

 

Member Feedback Integral to Committee’s VAM Plans

Drs. Peter Gloviczki, Peter Lawrence, Frank Veith and Mike Dalsing all have something in common:  they’ve faced a serious complication in surgery, managed it and learned lessons from the experience.

With several others, these surgeons will relate their stories at a postgraduate session at the 2017 Vascular Annual Meeting.

Dr. Kellie Brown, chair of the SVS Postgraduate Education Committee, anticipates this course will be hugely popular. “My Worst Complication: How it was Managed and Lessons Learned” is set for 10:15 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. Wednesday, May 31.

It is one of six postgraduate courses, 14 concurrent sessions, six breakfast sessions and several workshops the committee is guiding from concept to completion for VAM 2017. This year’s meeting will be May 31 to June 3 in San Diego, with plenaries and exhibits from June 1 to 3.

Though the committee may develop educational courses outside of the annual meeting, most of its work is related to VAM programming, said Dr. Brown.

“We listen very carefully to membership feedback and revamp offerings based on that feedback,” said Dr. Brown. Attendees commented last year that they felt 90 minutes was too long for several workshop topics. So workshops have been restructured into 30-minute sessions in a two-hour time frame with the opportunity to rotate among workshops during a session. Each block of sessions costs $100.

Feedback from one year also can provide topics for the next. Several workshops this year arose from member requests, including a clinic on coding and billing, Dr. Brown said. “We tried to put topics we felt would be more interactive and conducive to small-group settings, such as coding and billing, into the workshops,” she said.

A breakfast session on aging surgeons, meanwhile, “was not on my radar at all. It was a committee suggestion,” Dr. Brown said. The Friday morning session will cover possible effects of aging on clinical performance, burnout, managing the transition to retirement and more.

For the first time, SVS also called for topic proposals from the general membership. Some VAM sessions, including a breakfast session on dialysis, are a result of that outreach. In fact, VAM will feature three sessions on that topic. “Members told us in feedback they want significant programming on hemodialysis,” explained Dr. Brown.

For 2017, the Postgraduate Committee added several concurrent sessions, including seven with partner societies. Such sessions were enthusiastically received last year and highlight the multidisciplinary approach to vascular care.

“What we want to do is make VAM as relevant to as many members of our constituency as possible,” Dr. Brown said of her committee’s focus. “We want to address situations they see every day as well as ones that are more uncommon, but important to be able to manage. We want our information to be useful, so it’s got to be something new and something they need to know.”

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