On the faculty
Dr Cutbush attended the Australian Orthopaedic Association Continuing Orthopaedic Education meeting as faculty. He gave a lecture on the arthroscopic Latarjet, including the practical tips and techniques that make it work, and chaired one of the scientific sessions.
The Australian Orthopaedic Association
The Australian Orthopaedic Association is the national body for orthopaedic surgeons in Australia. It oversees orthopaedic training, sets the requirements for continuing professional development, accredits subspecialty fellowship programmes, and administers the Australian Orthopaedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry. The Continuing Orthopaedic Education meeting is part of the Association's education programme for surgeons who have already completed training, at which current practice in each subspecialty area is reviewed and updated.
What the Latarjet procedure is
The Latarjet is an operation for shoulder instability, generally used where a shoulder has dislocated repeatedly and bone has been lost from the front of the socket. A small piece of bone from the shoulder blade, the coracoid process, is transferred with its attached tendon to the front of the socket, where it replaces the missing bone and adds a sling effect from the transferred tendon. It is usually considered where a soft tissue repair of the labrum alone would be unlikely to hold the shoulder, for example when a significant part of the socket rim is missing. The arthroscopic version is performed through keyhole incisions rather than through an open approach, and it is a technically demanding operation. Individual results vary.
Why technique lectures are given
A lecture on the practical detail of an operation covers the things that are not in the published description: how the patient is positioned, the order of the steps, which instrument suits which step, and what to do when an anatomical landmark is not where it should be. For a difficult procedure, that detail is often what separates a straightforward operation from a troublesome one.
Related information
See our shoulder instability, anterior instability and Latarjet with labral repair pages, and our post on the 2017 AOA COE meeting in Canberra.