PLENARY Southern Region Burn Conference Q Team San Jose POST CON Healing Touch at SRBC 2011
MEETING: 2011 Southern Region Burn Conference (SRBC), presented by the Southern Medical Association (SMA) and hosted by the Burn Center at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center at the Marriott Hotel and Benton Convention Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., on Dec. 1–4. Attended by general and plastic surgeons, emergency-medicine practitioners, surgical residents, medical students, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, occupational and physical therapists, and social workers, the conference “provides a learning resource for all burn-care disciplines at any level of experience,” said Vicki Baugh, SMA’s senior coordinator of professional development.
CHALLENGES: An ongoing challenge for SRBC is that it rotates annually among Southern cities with burn centers. As these destinations are almost always third-tier cities, they can present a travel obstacle for attendees. Baugh said: “We don’t really go into
result, Baugh worries that SMA is not reaching all of the nurses and occupational and physical therapists that she would like it to.
INITIATIVES: New at SRBC 2011 was a nurses’ symposium, intended to provide burn-center nurses with a venue in which to discuss best practices and issues affecting them, and to network. (Until SRBC 2011, the only opportunity for burn-center nurses to meet up had been at the American Burn Association’s annual meeting.) “It is a huge networking opportu- nity,” Baugh said. “We decided to get them together this year and see if they actually would open up and share experiences — and they did.” Twenty nurses attended, which was fewer than the 50 that SMA had been hoping for. “But for an inaugural [event],” Baugh said, “we were okay with 20.”
Another new initiative was a burn-safety advocacy course. “The Phoenix Society for Burn Survivors is very active with burn victims
Southern Region Burn Conference
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Advocacy, Leadership, Quality and Professional Identity
the big cities like Orlando or Atlanta.” Another recurring difficulty: “Working with new faces each year at the host burn center poses a challenge in their understanding of their responsibilities versus SMA’s management services.” This coming year’s host, for example, has had a hard time grasping her role, which includes providing the faculty and agenda for SRBC’s nurses’ special-interest group luncheon. “We provide the CME and the CEUs,” said Baugh.
One new challenge in 2011 was that — for the first time — all conference marketing was sent out electronically. “I think it [was success- ful],” Baugh said. “Where the communication fails is that when I send the brochure elec- tronically to the medical directors in the Southeast, I’m not so sure that they forward that on to everyone that they could.” As a
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and their families, but there’s nowhere you can go to get educated on how you can be an advocate for burn safety,” Baugh said. “So we brought [the advocacy course] on this year to advocate what their role could be outside the burn center.”
Although at press time Baugh had not yet mined her evaluations for hard data on how the session was received, she did hear from attendees that if anyone wasn’t there, it must not have had the proper marketing — be- cause everyone could have benefited from the course. “Again it gets back to the email marketing,” Baugh said, “and how do you get this information to the correct people.” n — Hunter R. Slaton
FOR MORE INFORMATION: http://sma.org/burn-2011
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Attendees Exhibitors www.pcma.org