July 2005 | Vol. 23, No 7

SVU's 28th Annual Conference

Message from the Annual Conference Chair

By Kathleen Carter, BSN RN RVT FSVU
2005 Annual Conference Chair

The SVU 28th Annual Conference in Chicago was a huge success, thanks to all who helped through their participation in abstract submission, invited speaker sessions, workshops, tutorials, sponsorships and educational grants. We had almost 400 registrants for the meeting who traveled from 40 states and 11 foreign countries. According to the evaluations, many of you took advantage of the Society for Vascular Surgery meeting next door to ours and attended some of their general sessions. We had a good number of SVS registrants visit our general sessions as well. The Program Committee appreciates the time taken by the attendees to write detailed evaluations. Most of you were in favor of meeting concurrently with the other vascular organizations (SVS, PVSS, SVMB).We will use the information on the evaluations to plan an even better meeting for next year and future Annual Conferences.

While there was largely a favorable response to the program content and format, there are always things we can do to improve the experience for our attendees and members. The room block situation this year was not in our control since the 2004-2005 contract (negotiated in 2001) between SVS and SVU named SVS responsible for all meeting and sleeping room facility contracts. SVU gave both the hotel, as well as SVS, our room requirements last October during a site visit to the Hyatt and again in February via conference calls and e-mails. However, the Hyatt room block sold out 6 weeks prior to the meeting and we are still waiting to find out why that happened once the SVS staff is able to investigate that further with the hotel. We are happy to report that in any future joint meetings between our organizations, each group will be responsible for its own contracts. At the time we were informed that there were no more available hotel rooms in the room block, we also found out that there were two very large conventions going on in Chicago that took up most of the hotel space downtown. The Rotarians International had 35,000 rooms held. At that time there were no available blocks of rooms for our attendees and we only had a small number of registrants and we were still 5 weeks out from the meeting. This was the reason SVU blocked rooms at the O’Hare Marriott hotels. We simply felt we had to have rooms somewhere in Chicago for our attendees. If we had been able to secure closer affordable rooms, we would have done so. Some downtown rooms opened up due to cancellations later on, but SVU could not wait until the last minute to secure sufficient rooms for attendees.

Thanks to all of you who were inconvenienced by staying so far away at the Marriott O’Hare hotels. SVU tried to make that work by having buses leave in shifts from the O’Hare sites so that attendees could attend the early morning tutorials or just the main meeting. Thank you to those of you who made kind comments about the buses having a late return to the hotel so you could stay downtown after the meeting to shop or dine. Many of you made the best of a situation that was not ideal, but your evaluations of the meeting itself would suggest it was worth it.

For those of you whose comments related to having more scientific papers and more research, we agree! The scientific paper sessions are comprised of abstracts submitted by YOU. We encourage all of you who have research or interesting cases to share to submit abstracts for 2006. The abstract deadline is November 21, 2005. If you need a mentor or any assistance in writing you abstract. Please contact Abstracts Committee Chair Courtney Nelms, BS, RVT, RDMS. We would love to see more submissions and more papers presented.

We had 40 invited speakers in our sessions this year with ten of them new speakers for SVU. Many of you wanted more time for questions and we will try to accommodate that in the future. For those of you who requested PowerPoint handouts, we will not likely be presenting the syllabus data in that format. First, there are some issues of copyright; some speakers do not wish to share their slides and most speakers do not have their presentations in final form in time to meet the printing deadlines before the meeting. Many of our excellent speakers are busy, just like all of you, and wait until closer to the meeting to finalize the talks. We reduced the cost of the registration fee this year and the smaller Final Program was much less expensive to print than a larger syllabus booklet as in previous years. In the future, we will try to give you more information and more room to take notes.

On behalf of the Program Committee and the hard working SVU staff members, thank you to all of you who took the time to visit our sponsors and thank them for their generous support of our educational sessions. We could not do a meeting of this caliber without their support. Thanks also to all the speakers who willingly gave of their time and talents without compensation. And finally, thank you to all the participants for your attention, comments, questions and expertise. See you in Philadelphia, June 1-3, 2006 for the 29th Annual Conference. If you have ideas or comments you did not express on your evaluations, please contact me at kcarter@vascularandtransplant.com. Thank you.