The faculty dinner
At the faculty dinner of the Japanese Shoulder Society meeting in Tokyo, October 2017, pictured with Dr Hiro Sugaya, congress president, and his wife.
The group photograph includes Greg Hoy of Melbourne, Eiji Itoi of Sendai and Quinn Throckmorton of Memphis.
The Japanese Shoulder Society and its annual meeting
The Japanese Shoulder Society is the national organisation in Japan for surgeons and researchers who concentrate on the shoulder. Its central activity is an annual scientific meeting at which members present their research, instructional sessions are run for surgeons in training, and invited faculty from other countries give longer talks on nominated subjects. Shoulder societies in most countries are organised along similar lines, and the pattern of a submitted scientific programme plus invited international faculty is the standard format.
Each congress has a president who leads the organising committee for that year. That role covers setting the theme of the meeting, assembling the programme, reviewing submitted work with the scientific committee and deciding who is invited to teach.
Why the faculty dinner is part of the programme
A function of this kind looks like a social occasion, and it is one, but it also does something the formal programme cannot. The invited faculty at an international shoulder meeting are usually drawn from a number of different countries and health systems, and many of them will have read one another's published work without ever having spoken.
Put at the same table, those surgeons compare how they handle the same problem under different constraints: what imaging is available to them, what implants their system will fund, how their referral patterns work, how their trainees are taught. Multi-centre studies, exchanges of fellows and invitations to visit each other's theatres tend to come out of these conversations rather than out of the lecture sessions. For a surgeon from Brisbane, the practical result is a set of colleagues in other countries who can be contacted about a difficult case or a disputed technique long after the meeting has finished.
These relationships also feed back into local practice and teaching. Techniques spread through personal contact between surgeons at least as much as through journals, and a dinner at the start of a congress is where a good deal of that contact begins.
Related information
- Our post on the JSS 2017 scientific meeting
- Our post on the day in theatre with Dr Sugaya
- Research
- Shoulder fellowship