The meeting
Dr Cutbush attended the Australian Hand Surgery Society Annual Scientific Meeting, held in Hobart in March 2015.
What the Australian Hand Surgery Society is
The Australian Hand Surgery Society is the specialty society for surgeons in Australia whose practice includes the hand and wrist. Its membership is drawn from both orthopaedic and plastic surgery, because hand surgery sits at the point where the two overlap: a single injury can involve bone, joint, tendon, nerve, blood vessel and skin at once, and treating it well means being competent across all of them. The society sets out training expectations for that field, supports research and runs an annual scientific meeting.
What an annual scientific meeting does
An annual scientific meeting is the main yearly gathering of a specialty society. Members submit research for consideration, and the accepted work is presented in short papers that are then opened to questions from the audience. Invited speakers deliver longer lectures, instructional sessions cover technique, and difficult cases are put to a panel for discussion. A great deal of what is presented has not yet been published, so a meeting of this kind is usually where a new finding is first argued over in public.
Attending matters for a practical reason as well. Written guidance explains what to do, but it is far less good at conveying why one approach is chosen over another in a particular situation. Hearing a technique questioned by surgeons who have tried it and found its limits is a different kind of information from reading the paper that described it.
Why the hand matters in upper limb practice
The shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand work as one chain. Conditions such as nerve injury, stiffness and arthritis do not confine themselves to a single joint, and a problem at the shoulder is often first noticed as difficulty using the hand. Surgeons who treat the upper limb therefore follow developments across the whole of it. Individual results vary, and assessment of any upper limb problem begins with examination of the limb as a whole.