Written by: rsnyman on October 25, 2014 @ 12:14 pm

I attended the 74th annual Australian Orthopaedic Association (AOA) ASM last week in Melbourne. The AOA is our training and accreditation body, maintaining high standards of orthopaedic surgery in Australia. The ASM is an annual meeting which addresses technical advances and allows the presentation of new research.

This year discussion was focussed on evidence based medicine in orthopaedics. Do we have evidence for the operations we do? Evidence for the benefits of surgery is harder to collect than in other areas of medicine due to the inherent difficultly in designing blinded studies. Blinding of patients in a study means you are not sure wether you received the treatment or not. This would normally involve a skin incision only, hence the difficulty in patient recruitment! Also discussed was the overall lack of evidence for stem cell therapy and other injectable treatments for arthritis.

There was also a very interesting International Presidents Forum. This was a forum of the orthopaedic leaders of countries such as Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, USA, South Africa and New Zealand. Common issues were:

•  Mal-distribution of surgeons between city and regional areas.
• Immigration of surgeons and overseas trained doctors. (ASEAN and the EU are both working to common accreditation – much like the states of Australia did just a few years ago)
• Emergency cases cancelling elective surgery.
• Increasing government regulation.
• Funding of research.

Overall it was a very beneficial few days and good to meet with colleagues that were influential in my own training.