Spring is in the air: Flowers are blooming, trees are budding, and the SHM Annual Meeting is fast approaching.
Held Wednesday, May 3, through Friday, May 5, 2006, in Washington, D.C., the 9th Annual Meeting will include comprehensive education designed for hospitalists, networking with physicians from around the country, and chatting with your representatives in Congress. (See “Legislative Advocacy Day Debuts,” p. 10.)
“The SHM Annual Meeting is the largest gathering of all the stakeholders in hospital medicine, presenting a unique networking opportunity,” says Larry Wellikson, MD, FACP, CEO of SHM. “In 2006 we’re using the meeting’s location in our nation’s capitol to help hospitalists to be advocates for their patients and their specialty by meeting with their elected Members of Congress.”
The focus of the meeting, as always, will be the education offered. “Whatever your specialty, this meeting allows you to get something out of it,” says Alpesh Amin, MD, course director for the Annual Meeting. “There will be something for beginning hospitalists as well as more mature hospitalists. We’ll cover a lot of core topics.”
Education Covers Core Competencies
The basis for all education offered during the meeting is SHM’s new core competencies, developed by the Education Committee and released in January 2006. (The Core Competencies in Hospital Medicine: A Framework for Curriculum Development debuted in a supplement to the first issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine.) The goal is to have these core competencies serve as the backbone for how hospitalists are recruited, trained, and certified in hospital medicine, as well as to standardize expectations for learning and proficiency.
“Our goal was to include [the core competencies] as a base for developing sessions, workshops, and lectures” at the Annual Meeting, says Dr. Amin. “We’re asking speakers to incorporate relevant core competencies into their lectures.”
To learn more about the new framework, Annual Meeting attendees can come to a session about the core competencies offered on Thursday, May 4 from 10:10 to 10:35 a.m.
Choose from Multiple Learning Tracks
Attendees at the Annual Meeting can customize their educational experience by choosing sessions from one or more of six general tracks:
Adult clinical: This track emphasizes recent advances that should be incorporated into the hospitalist’s approach to clinical care delivery. Sessions will cover diabetes management, acute coronary syndromes, chronic heart failure, addiction medicine, resuscitation, and much more.