Two awards
Congratulations to Kristine Italia and Jashint Maharaj, who have both received awards from the Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Association.
Tin, a fellow at the clinic, won the Young Orthopaedic Surgeon grant, and Jashint won the Young Orthopaedic Researcher grant. Both will travel to the APOA Sports meeting in Kuala Lumpur later this year.
What the Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Association is
The Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Association is the regional body for orthopaedic surgery across the Asia Pacific. It brings together the national orthopaedic associations of the region, holds a congress and a programme of subspecialty meetings, and supports education and training through fellowships, courses and grants. For Australian surgeons it is the regional organisation, sitting between the national associations and the global bodies.
Why grants of this kind exist
Early career grants are how a specialty invests in the people who will carry its research. A surgeon or researcher in the first years of a career often has the time and the interest to pursue a question properly, but not the funding, the travel budget or the standing to attract either. A grant from a regional association addresses that, and it carries a second benefit: the recipient is expected to present the work at a meeting of the association, so the research enters the regional discussion rather than sitting in a local file.
Competitive awards also act as a form of external review. An application is assessed by people with no connection to the unit it came from, which is a useful check on whether a research question is worth the years it will take to answer.
Research and clinical practice
Most of the questions worth answering in shoulder surgery come out of the clinic rather than the laboratory. Why does a particular repair hold in some shoulders and not others. Does one implant design behave differently from another over time. How should anyone measure whether a shoulder is genuinely working better after an operation, as opposed to merely hurting less on the day of review.
Answering questions of that kind takes registry data, biomechanical testing and long term follow up of patients, which is slow and unglamorous work. It depends on having people early in their careers willing to do it. Individual results vary, and research of this kind describes groups of patients rather than predicting the course for any one person.
Related information
See our research and publications pages, the shoulder fellowship page, and our post on the APOA Young Orthopaedic Surgeons Grant and the work it funded.