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In the News Section of the Cutting Edge, we highlight some of the professional and personal updates on AAST members.
- Dr. Brandon Bruns joined the department of surgery at UT Southwestern as the section chief of trauma and acute care surgery and trauma medical director at Parkland. https://twitter.com/UTSW_Surgery/status/1410587832520003588?s=20
- Congratulations to Dr. Anne Stey for securing NIH funding on “Timeliness of Management of Trauma Related Hemorrhage and Trauma Related Coagulopathy” https://twitter.com/AnneMStey/status/1404825849640144905?s=20
- Congratulations to Dr. Nicole Stassen for being awarded the Chief Residents’ Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Rochester. https://twitter.com/URMCSurgery/status/1405508865572098058?s=20
- Congratulations to Drs. Karen Brasel, Andre Campbell, Kimberly Davis, and Haytham Kaafarani for being appointed to the editorial board of Annals of Surgery
- Congratulations to Dr. Rachel Calcutt as the Chief of the Division of Trauma, Critical Care & Acute Care Surgery at UC Davis. https://twitter.com/UCDavisSurgery/status/1400151045423046660?s=20
- Congratulations to Dr. Zara Cooper for being appointed the inaugural Michele and Howard J. Kessler Distinguished Chair in Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. https://twitter.com/BrighamSurgery/status/1396816716999581696?s=20
- Congratulations to Dr. Maggie Brandt on her promotion to Professor of Surgery at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
- Congratulations to AAST member Catherine Velopulos, MD, MHS who was recently awarded an R-01 grant for her project entitled "Modifiable factors in emergent presentation of potentially elective general surgical disease for patients who are insured or insurance-eligible." The main focus of the project will be to understand why having health care coverage (or eligibility) has not been sufficient to allow equal access to elective surgical care. The project will use a multiphase mixed method approach to 1) identify modifiable factors for emergency presentation and explore the trajectory of progression to elective versus emergency surgery using a convergent mixed-methods design, combining quantitative variables with qualitative narrative data, 2) identify and quantify additional modifiable factors from the patient perspective that are not available in clinical or administrative datasets using an exploratory sequential design, using identified domains to conduct systematic review and meta-analysis for quantitative data, and 3) determine which modifiable factors identified will have the greatest impact for future intervention strategies. The goal of this project will be to model and understand what influences the persistent disparity in access to elective surgical care despite increased coverage, and predict which factors contribute the most to the disparities and thus hold potential for the greatest impact. Dr. Velopulos MD is an Associate Professor of Surgery in the Division of GI, Trauma and Endocrine Surgery (GITES) at the University of Colorado Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus and also serves as the Interim Trauma Medical Director. She is interested in how the intersection of policy, economics, and behavior affect access to care and health care delivery, and how these are influenced by the physical environment and social determinants of health.
If you have an update on an AAST member that you would like to highlight in the Cutting Edge Newsletter, please send us the info at aast@aast.org