President's Message
Todd J. Albert, MD
SRS President 2017-2018
I hope you have had a wonderful summer and are enjoying time with your family and potentially some time out of the office. I am pleased to report that June was Scoliosis Awareness Month and during it SRS had significant activities related to this as well as public engagement. We were connected through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. This led to 228,038 total impressions and 15,571 total engagements.
We had an outstanding 25th IMAST meeting. The sessions were great and the feedback was excellent. Based on some of the feedback from member sessions important changes will be happening going forward. IMAST will receive separate abstract submissions and in 2020 the meeting will be held in April instead of July. Exact dates and locations are still under review by the Long Range Planning Committee. The meeting will partially return to its original intent of showing new innovative techniques, potentially shorter follow-up and more hands-on training.
Likewise, we are looking forward to a spectacular Annual Meeting program to be held in the wonderful city of Bologna, the gastronomic capital of Italy. Suken Shah is preparing a fantastic Pre-Meeting Course focused on physician wellbeing and health and Greg Mundis has a terrific program planned for us. Our Howard Steel lecture will be a noted culinary and wine expert, Kevin Zraly, speaking about food and wine of the region. The Harrington Lecture will be given by James Kerr, the author of “Legacy”, the global bestseller about leadership and the principles that led to the achievements of the world’s most successful rugby team, the All Blacks, from New Zealand. His lecture will focus on these principles and is titled, Insight into the Success of the All Blacks.
Note: During the Annual Meeting there will only be two business meetings, Thursday October 11, 13:30 to 14:45 and Friday October 12, 7:30 to 8:45. While there will be fewer meetings, they have been increased in duration so that only 30 minutes of our normally allotted time will be missed. Members will continue to hear about the work of the committees and the councils over the last year and voting will be held for new officers and members of the 2018-2019 Nominating Committee. Other exciting modifications to this year’s meeting include beginning the scientific program the afternoon of Wednesday, October 10 which allows for 20 additional abstracts, as well as the terrific Pre-Meeting Course that morning.
I would like to thank the committee members and council chairs for their incredible hard work in running the business of the Society and the fantastic job they have done. I also want to give thanks to my partner members on the Presidential Line and our Board of Directors for their support. I believe it has been a spectacular year for the SRS with great changes implemented and fantastic things to come.
I look forward to seeing you all in Bologna.