As I write, it is 1 degree Fahrenheit and dreary in Kansas City, where I live. That’s minus 17 degrees Celsius for many of you. I hope that it is cheerier and bordering on springtime when you’re reading. You’ll understand, though, why I say Happy 2021! 2020 was a humdinger in many ways.
Dr. Steven Q. Simpson
One of those ways, of course, was the COVID-19 pandemic, which wrought so many things – face masks, social distancing, steep learning curves, over 300,000 excess deaths, and new vaccines. For CHEST, it meant that two of our most important educational opportunities of the year, board review and the annual meeting, were held virtually. Dr. Levine has already written about the board reviews, so I’ll focus on the annual meeting, held in late October.
In many ways, the meeting was a success. We had over 6,800 attendees. There were 88 live online sessions, 22 that were semi-live, and 160 prerecorded sessions. For presenters, this was simultaneously both easy and difficult. They had to ensure that their recording equipment and their Internet access were of sufficient quality, and if prerecorded, the sessions had to be finished weeks ahead of time. But the presentations could be given from presenters’ homes or from their normal work offices. For attendees, the ability for nonsimultaneous playback allowed for fitting the meeting into a work-life schedule. In fact, at least one friend related that he watched sessions with a grandchild on his lap. However, it meant a lack of opportunities to ask clarifying questions of the presenters, which is a common activity at the end of a session, and the opportunity to see and catch up with old friends and colleagues was missing. Simulations, of course, could not be hands-on, but virtual educational games matured significantly. The satisfaction scores from both attendees and faculty were good, if slightly below our usual scores for live meetings. They told us that we all prefer our in-person meetings, but that content is deliverable and receivable in an online format. Overall, we have to consider the CHEST 2020 online platform to be a successful endeavor.
Which brings me to our plans for future meetings. The Board of Regents discussed the alternatives for CHEST 2021. Should we hold a live meeting in Vancouver, as planned? Should we hold another online meeting like the one we just discussed? None of us has the crystal ball that tells us exactly how COVID-19 is going to develop. We don’t know exactly how many people will be vaccinated either north or south of the U.S.-Canada border. While those of us who care for patients in the United States have had the opportunity to be vaccinated, we don’t know if the professional staff from CHEST headquarters who travel to the annual meeting will be vaccinated, even though that prospect is currently looking very reasonable. We don’t know if the Canadian government will be allowing U.S. residents to visit Canada without quarantine. There are just quite a few things that we can’t know. However, convention centers need to know if we will be there, and we needed to decide.
In the end, a couple of things swayed us—the unexpected availability of a U.S. convention center and uncertainty about travel to Canada. We are planning to hold CHEST 2021 in Orlando, Florida, during our usual late October time frame. CHEST 2021 is slated to be the first in-person pulmonary, critical care, and sleep conference to be held in the United States in 2 years. The Executive Program Committee has met, and program selections have been made. Very soon, invitations will go to our prospective faculty, and we will be underway. We are planning CHEST 2021 as what we call a “hybrid” meeting, a meeting that will provide an excellent experience whether one attends in person at the Orlando Convention Center or partakes of the meeting from home. Some sessions will be broadcast live and others will be prerecorded. Needless to say, the experience will not be equal for in-person and at-home learners, but it will be equitable. Regardless of how you choose to partake, CHEST 2021 will have excellent content to suit your needs. This plan also allows us the ability to convert to a fully online meeting, should the COVID-19 circumstances dictate that we must. Having sat in on the program committee meetings, I am excited about what we have to offer. So, dig around and find your old mouse ears or your red forehead scar. CHEST 2021 will be a dynamite experience for us all to share.
Our board review sessions, which are also among the most highly valued of CHEST activities, will be different out of necessity. Again, decisions had to be made many months ahead of time, and we have chosen to hold our board reviews online again this year. COVID-19 uncertainties certainly play into our decision to not put attendees in a room together. However, the ability to play and replay, slow down and speed up video content, and ability to watch any session any time are all well suited to reviewing for an examination. We think this is the appropriate decision for 2021, but we may be back together again for future sessions. Frankly, we are listening to hear which format our attendees like more. And, we are plotting how to make the online platform review even better.
The Board of Regents has been hard at work on a lot of fronts, but I want to focus on one of them, for now. It is important to the Board of Regents and to me, personally, that CHEST be the single most inclusive and diverse professional medical society, bar none. It is of utmost importance that we remove any barriers that might have inadvertently been put into place that would hamper the success of any of our members or their patients. In other words, we hope to find any implicit biases in attitude and behavior and to illuminate and remedy them. We have begun the process by focusing on what CHEST is all about – making a difference with our patients and corporate self and being an inclusive and diverse professional organization.
We believe that we must look at ourselves in three separate, but related, ways. We must examine our patient-facing side and the ways in which we help our members to serve their patients. We must examine our headquarters and our hiring, working, and promoting practices to ensure an inclusive and welcoming environment for the staff who do our day to day business. Finally, we must examine ourselves and our member-based organization, to ensure that all can participate freely in CHEST opportunities and, for those who aspire to lead our organization, to ensure that there are no implicit biases that hold them back.
We began the process with a series of regional listening sessions across the United States, sponsored by the CHEST Foundation, in which we heard from both patients and community leaders of color. We learned of challenges that our patients face in accessing care, communicating with their doctors, and obtaining the medications they need for their illness. Our professional staff has organized an anti-racism task force and is working to ensure that we can be proud of a diverse and inclusive work environment. For our members, we have held two board development sessions, so that our Board of Regents can examine us and our attitudes toward race and toward inclusiveness in our organization. We will soon be holding a listening session with CHEST members of color with the express purpose of allowing those of us who are not persons of color to better understand the challenges faced by our members and to understand where organizational changes could be necessary to help make their professional lives better. As a long time CHEST member, I believe that CHEST is not purposefully exclusive of anyone. We are, nevertheless, a part of the larger fabric of society, and because of that, we are subject to having implicit biases and practices as an organization. Our best path to be aware of them and to deal with them is to hear from our members who experience them, and we shall.
I will end on a note that is somber but important. In the past year, we have all lost friends and colleagues with whom we worked side by side, to COVID-19. Many of them have been CHEST members. Because of the pandemic, we have often not been able to mourn those we have cared about in the same ways that we normally would, in the company of friends and family. Yet, it is important for us to remember our colleagues and to share our memories. So, we established CHEST Remembers, a memorial wall on the CHEST website where we can post the news of our friends’ passing, along with our remembrances of them. If your friend or colleague has died of COVID-19, please feel free to share with the CHEST community. You can find the link to do that at www.chestnet.org.