After the meeting
Coffee with Damian McClelland, a guest speaker from the University Hospitals of North Midlands in the United Kingdom, following the Royal North Shore Shoulder meeting.
Some of the most useful conversations at a meeting happen after the sessions have finished.
About the Royal North Shore shoulder meeting
Royal North Shore Hospital is a large teaching hospital in Sydney, and its shoulder meeting is one of the regular Australian gatherings for surgeons working in this area. Meetings of this kind usually combine presented research with case discussion, and most invite one or more guest speakers from overseas.
Why overseas guest speakers are invited
Inviting a surgeon from another country does more than fill a session. Practice varies between health systems: the implants on the shelf differ, the thresholds for offering an operation differ, and services are organised differently. A guest speaker describing how a problem is managed in their own unit gives the room a point of comparison it would not otherwise have, and the questions that follow are often the most useful part of the session. Individual results vary.
The value of the conversations afterwards
Formal sessions are time limited and public, which shapes what gets said in them. The discussions afterwards are where surgeons tend to go into the detail of a difficult case, a complication, or a step in a technique that did not work as described in print. Little of that appears in a programme, and none of it can be arranged in advance.
Those conversations also have consequences. Multi-centre research, exchanges of fellows and visits between units almost always begin with two surgeons having talked at a meeting, found that they were working on the same problem, and kept in contact.
Related information
See our posts on the RNS Shoulder Symposium and rotator cuff repairs and retear, and our rotator cuff repair and shoulder surgery pages.