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SAN ANTONIO -- Around 5,700 clinicians and researchers in the fields of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine will gather this weekend here for CHEST 2018, the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.
"Learn by Doing" will be a key theme of the meeting, highlighted by a program that includes cutting-edge sessions and hands-on opportunities to allow participants to learn through active participation while networking with peers from around the globe.
"We've always had here at CHEST a reputation for simulation and active learning, but we are really going to step it up a notch in San Antonio," said program chair and sleep medicine specialist David A. Schulman, MD, MPH, of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
He said, compared to past meetings, CHEST 83rd Annual Meeting will include more simulations, peer-learning experiences and opportunities for team-based education to help physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and nurses work better as a team.
"And we're going to try something really cool," he added. "We're going to crowd-source content. We're going to let the audience tell us what they want to hear and build sessions for them in real time. This is something we've never tried before."
Schulman said meeting planners have curated a list of different topics of interest, and meeting attendees will vote on what they want to hear.
"The idea is to put together a session that meets their needs," he told Ƶ. "It's an experiment. You've heard of improv comedy. This is improv learning."
In all, more than 400 sessions are scheduled for the meeting, held October 6-10 at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.
New this year will be Deeper Dive Sessions, which will allow attendees to gather input and feedback from their peers and faculty on specific cases addressing challenging topics and cases.
"We made an effort to shorten our sessions a lot this year, but we also wanted to allow time for our audience to interact and engage," Shulman said. "Sometimes the best education comes from discussion. So we identified certain areas we think are optimal for deeper dives, which means participants, if they want to, can migrate to an interactive theater area where they can continue to discuss the material."
Also new are "bite-sized teaching" sessions designed to optimize attendee time by addressing single topics in 8- to 10-minute time periods.
Keynote speakers will include past CHEST president and longtime editor-in-chief of the CHEST journal, Richard S. Irwin, MD, and Scott Zimmer, who will speak on the topic of inter-generational interactions in the workplace.
"The question of how we get the millennials and the baby boomers on the same page is very relevant in our field and all across medicine and society," Schulman said. "They have very different needs in terms of what drives them, what their work-life balance is like, and what motivates them to work harder."
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CHEST Annual Meeting 2018