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Category: January 2020

It is hard to believe that it is already 2020! For this edition, we asked our members what they would like to see the hand surgery community accomplish in the new year. Improved decision-making, data sharing, and conversation efforts are among the thoughtful answers presented in this month’s issue.

Patient Safety Scenario #19: Know Your Team

This essay is the 19th installment of the monthly Patient Safety essays, produced by the Patient Safety Subcommittee of the Ethics and Professionalism Committee. The essays are written in the spirit of the aviation industry’s “Black Box Thinking”: in order to inform and improve our medical safety record, we need to analyze our errors. To read […]

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What Not to Wear

By Robert B. Carrigan, MD The hand surgery community and the American Society for Surgery of the Hand have a long tradition of embracing technology and methodology to address challenging conditions related to hand surgery. Society members have contributed their expertise to develop appropriate use criteria (AUC) to aid in the management of clinical conditions […]

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Being Present

By Roger Cornwall, MD Last week, at the end of a long and stressful day balancing clinic, surgeries, and lab grant applications, I did something that no sane, nearly 50-year-old hand surgeon should probably do. But it ended up being exactly what I needed. I walked into a local gymnastics gym to practice with the […]

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2020 Resolution: Work-Life Balance?

By Victoria D. Knoll, MD On December 6, 2019, I received an email asking me to contribute to ASSH perspectives. The suggested writing prompt was, “What is something you’d like to see the hand surgery community achieve in 2020?” Being the busiest month of the year, by the time I had read the email, I had missed […]

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New Year, New Me…

By Min Jung Park, MD, MMSc Cliché. We have heard it many times. I wish I could come up with something spectacular I can suggest for the hand surgery community to achieve in 2020, but I would like to re-emphasize something that has resonated with the greater physician community in recent years: self-care. Self-care can […]

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2020 Means Better Decisions

By Amar A. Patel, MD How do surgeons make decisions? I recently had a discussion with some close friends from medical school (physicians spanning from primary care to medical and surgical specialties). A few frustrated friends in particular brought up something that really resonated with me: Surgery (including hand surgery, orthopedic surgery, and plastic surgery) has […]

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Hand Surgery 2020: We Can Dream, Can’t We?

By Julie B. Samora, MD, PhD There are so many avenues we could pursue as a community to enhance care for our patients, improve satisfaction, streamline efficiency of care, and increase overall safety.  If I could only choose one issue to tackle for 2020 (one teensy-weensy issue), it would be to develop universal interoperability in […]

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Improved Conservation

By Jennifer F. Waljee, MD In this new decade, it is critical to identify pragmatic strategies to reduce, reuse, and recycle in Hand Surgery in order to reduce healthcare expenditures and our environmental footprint. Surgery is one of the highest consumers of supplies and energy in healthcare, and also one of the largest generators of […]

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