Conferences

Our conferences and meetings provide you with the specialty knowledge you need supplemented by the addition of current information on practice management, ethics and medicolegal topics relate to hand surgery. 

You’ll find that didactic instruction in our program improves your knowledge of patient safety while also covering basic science subjects related to clinical surgery of the hand, such as anatomy, biomechanics, biomaterials, physiology, pathology, genetics, microbiology, and pharmacology.

Our faculty members hold a weekly morning conference. In addition to this, you can expect to attend citywide grand rounds; journal club; research and indications meetings; and meetings with a committee for quality improvement.

Our indications conference gives you the opportunity to present clinical cases — with images, including photographs of X-rays — and discuss the specifics of a patient’s management. These conferences, which include short didactic sessions, will sharpen your knowledge of principles including:

• topic/diagnosis
• etiology 
• surgical and non-surgical management choices
• prognosis

At our indications conference, trainees present cases for educational benefit, and to ensure you’re exposed to a wide range of cases, we ensure that duplicate or similar cases are not presented on a given day or within a short time span.

This conference will benefit you by giving you — along with our faculty physicians — the opportunity to discuss upcoming clinical problem cases in advance of care. Our fellows find it an especially useful time to talk about difficult cases from any faculty member’s office or the clinic.

Each month, we hold journal club in lieu of an indications conference. You will review articles from multiple periodicals and strengthen your knowledge in areas including research design, medical statistics, evidence-based medical practices, appraisal skills, clinical epidemiology and clinical decision theory.

Fellows who have completed our program report that journal club has helped instill in them a career-long habit of staying up-to-date with the orthopaedic literature. 

We hold research meetings on a quarterly basis, enabling you to discuss your research project with faculty members.

Research is a vital part of your training, and this meeting enables you to both present and defend all of your materials.

Our program has a Quality Improvement Committee, which you’ll meet with on a quarterly basis.

Since we require you to complete a quality assessment/quality improvement project, you’ll be responsible for discussing your project with the faculty in these meetings. 

The Department of Orthopaedics holds grand rounds meetings each week. These include clinical case presentations by trainees from the orthopaedic residency.

Grand rounds meetings are a valuable component of your didactic training. Our hand service is responsible for several of these conferences throughout year.