CHEST 2018 Round Up

2018 CHEST round up

This month we write about the 2018 CHEST conference in San Antonio. The American College of Chest Physicians has shaken up the format this year by shortening some of their post graduate courses (I think they realized that Post-Graduate people no longer have the attention span to sit through 8 hours of lecture), adding bite sized learning with 15 min pop up sessions in the expo center, and if the CHEST challenge game wasn’t fun enough…they added food and alcohol to the mix and made it a blast!

The moto of the meeting this year was “learn by doing” and there were plenty of opportunities to have hands on experiences, as well as, opportunities to sit shoulder to shoulder with giants in the field.  Most importantly, CHEST continued on its Team Focused planning from last year by assuring there were multiple APP presenters and faculty, skills lab instructors, hosted an APP meet up, and they held an APP focus group this year to query what our profession needs from them. Not only did they make us feel welcome, they made us feel like we were a priority to the college.

CHEST 2018 was also APAPP’s first public appearance. We would like to thank the ACCP again who donated our booth so that we could be present and engage with APPs in the field. The response was overwhelming. Our booth was often mobbed by APPs and physicians saying “where have you been?” “Why hasn’t someone done this sooner?” and “I want to get involved”.  Music to our ears. We more than doubled our membership in 3 days and are encouraged that we are on the right path to great things for our organization and its members.

APAPP will be holding it’s Annual Meeting of the Members at next year’s CHEST conference in New Orleans October 19^th-23^rd. We hope to see you there.