Colleagues:

Please join me in sending our heartfelt prayers and thoughts to our Society members in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas and all the areas recently hit by disaster.

We know that their days are now far longer and more filled with tragedy than they should be. While we are always proud of our members, we are especially heartened by those who toil tirelessly in times of emergency, whether it has been in recent weeks, on the battlefield or in previous disasters.

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For surgeons, it can be difficult to get patients to come back a year after surgery for follow-up tests or an office visit.

Vascular Nurses Week is September 10-16

Vascular Nurses Week begins Sunday, Sept. 10, and runs through Saturday, Sept. 16. In honor of our valued colleagues, SVS President Dr. R. Clement Darling, III, has written the attached letter (at the link below) thanking them for all they do. The letter also has been sent to the Society for Vascular Nursing.

Please print out this letter and post it prominently in your office. And of course, remember to let your colleagues know personally how much they are valued!

As we age, it is common to be concerned about heart disease or high blood pressure. But many people don’t know that those conditions are also related to another common health issue, peripheral artery disease (PAD). Unfortunately, many patients are not diagnosed until it has progressed.

Thanks to mailings and websites that claim statin medications are harmful or unnecessary, many patients are confused about whether they should take them. That’s unfortunate.

The simple introduction of a color-coded card has helped two Texas facilities improve discharge medication compliance and documentation, potentially improving patient outcomes.

A poster abstract, "The Right Meds for the Right Outcomes: A Quality Improvement Initiative Focused on Improving Discharge Medication Compliance and Documentation Across Multiple Registries," presented the compliance problem and steps to mitigate it at the Vascular Quality Initiative’s annual meeting in late May.

The abstract won the inaugural Poster Contest. Rosha Nodine, BAAS, was chief author.

The SVS Executive Board has established a task force charged with exploring the potential for developing a vascular certification program for inpatient and outpatient vascular care settings. Anton Sidawy, MD, has been appointed chair of the task force, which will integrate and provide oversight of two working subcommittees: one for inpatient and one for outpatient office-based care. Dr. Krishna Jain, MD, has been appointed chair of the Office-Based Endovascular Center (OBEC) outpatient Subcommittee. A chair for the Inpatient Subcommittee has yet to be named.

The 2017 Vascular Annual Meeting piled on the events: six postgraduate courses, and only time to attend three. Concurrent sessions that – true to their name – were held at the same time. Ditto with breakfast sessions. So, unless you used a time machine, there was no way to hit every session at VAM that you wanted to attend.

Now you can see what you missed, or view particularly useful sessions again. Purchase the On-Demand Library, a valuable resource of audio and slide recordings of numerous VAM educational session.

Other members of the 2017-2018 Executive Committee include:

Dr. Michel Makaroun, president-elect

Dr. Makaroun is a professor of surgery and of clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh and served as SVS vice president during the presidency of Dr. Ronald Fairman.