At the ESSKA Congress
The Brisbane Shoulder Fellowship had a strong presence at the 21st ESSKA Congress in Milan, Italy. The congress theme, "Science Meets Art", ran through many of the presentations given by Fellowship members.
Four representatives attended: Brandon Ziegenfuss, Ruth Delaney, Freek Hollman and Ashish Gupta. Having several members of the group presenting at the same meeting makes it a more productive few days, since the sessions worth attending can be covered between them.
What ESSKA is
ESSKA is the European Society for Sports Traumatology, Knee Surgery and Arthroscopy. It is one of the larger specialist societies in orthopaedics, covering sports injuries, arthroscopic surgery and the surgery of the knee and other joints, and it holds its congress every two years. The society also produces consensus documents, in which groups of surgeons work through the available evidence on a contested question and publish an agreed position. That is among the more useful things a society of its size can do, because it gives a surgeon somewhere to start on a question the literature has not settled.
What a congress of this kind involves
A congress runs over several days with many sessions in parallel: free papers reporting new research, instructional course lectures, symposiums on contested topics and poster presentations. The scale is precisely why a group benefits from sending several people. No individual can attend more than a fraction of the programme, and a team that divides the sessions and compares notes afterwards covers a great deal more than one delegate ever could.
Why presenting at an international congress matters
Research presented at a congress is subjected to questions from the floor, which is a different and sometimes more searching test than written peer review. A presenter has to answer on the spot, in front of people working on the same problem, on matters such as how patients were selected, how outcomes were measured and whether the follow up ran long enough to support the conclusion drawn.
For a research group it is also how work becomes known before it is published, since the interval between a congress presentation and a journal article is often a year or more. Individual results vary, and research reported at a congress describes groups of patients rather than predicting the outcome for any one person.
Related information
See also our post on the ESSKA Basic Science Abstract Awards, and our research, publications and shoulder fellowship pages.