The meeting
Dr Cutbush attended the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons annual meeting in Las Vegas in March 2015.
The final day was a subspecialty day hosted by the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons society together with the Arthroscopy Association of North America, which is the part of the meeting most directly relevant to shoulder practice.
What the Academy and its annual meeting are
The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons is the professional body for orthopaedic surgeons in the United States. Among other things it produces clinical practice guidelines, educational material and position statements, and it organises an annual scientific meeting that is one of the larger gatherings in the speciality.
A meeting of that kind is built around presentations of new research, instructional course lectures, symposia in which several surgeons set out different approaches to the same problem, and exhibitions of instruments and implants. Orthopaedics covers the whole musculoskeletal system, so the programme runs across hips, knees, spine, hand, foot and ankle, trauma and paediatrics as well as the shoulder.
The shoulder subspecialty day
A subspecialty day is a single-topic programme attached to the main meeting and organised by the society that represents that narrower field. The American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons society is the American subspecialty society for the shoulder and elbow, and the Arthroscopy Association of North America is the society for arthroscopic, or keyhole, surgery. Between them they cover both the region and the technique most relevant to this practice.
Concentrating a whole day on one area allows subjects to be followed further than a general programme permits: how a particular procedure is performed step by step, how published series of patients have fared over several years, and where opinion among surgeons remains divided. Individual results vary, and the purpose of attending is to keep what is offered in Brisbane in line with current evidence rather than to adopt whatever is newest.
Why surgeons attend meetings like this
Attendance at scientific meetings forms part of the continuing professional development that specialists in Australia are required to maintain and record. It is also how surgeons see work before it is published, and how they meet colleagues overseas whose results they have otherwise only read about, which makes later discussion of difficult cases a good deal easier.
Related information
- Our shoulder surgery page
- Our shoulder injuries page
- Consultation information