Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Weekly Plastic Surgery Grand Rounds

2012; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 130; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1097/prs.0b013e3182550466

1529-4242

Alexandra Condé‐Green, Luther H. Holton, Devinder Singh, Sheri Slezak,

Conferences and Exhibitions Management

Sir:FigureAt most academic plastic surgery institutions, weekly grand rounds are organized where professors and trainees gather during 60 to 90 minutes to present general topics and special cases and to review the week's morbidity and mortality. One thing we thought was absent in these meetings was the possibility of discussing the day-to-day events that are occurring in our field nationally and around the world, with new discoveries, new U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved materials, plastic surgery meetings, scandals, and others. As we are living in an era of social technologies that empower users to generate content and share information in real time,1 we felt it was imperative that we be informed and ready to address questions, doubts of our patients, and the public in general about issues that may evolve in the online world and are not yet published in our journals. As most of us incorporate social media in our private life to communicate with friends, we have noticed recently that numerous plastic surgeons, private clinics, universities, hospitals, plastic surgery societies, organizations, meetings, and journals have incorporated the social network (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) to benefit themselves, the patients, and the communities they serve. For example, through a unique motto such as Facebook's “friending” or “liking,” you can follow their interests by clicking on the links posted, go to the page of interest, or even further enter the site of reference for more details. This allows you not only to build robust professional networks but also to be informed on the go, reading valuable posts and engaging in real-time conversations on salient plastic surgery issues (Table 1).Table 1: Examples of Pages and Links Consulted on Facebook and Twitter*There is no dedicated time or place to discuss these issues with our peers at our institution, and with many academic plastic surgeons not having the time or interest to consult daily social media, like those in private practice who do it mainly to recruit patients,2 we created “Plastic Surgery Newsweek in 5 Minutes.” Each week after grand rounds, the first author takes 5 minutes to go over the headlines in our field, and both trainees and professors get to exchange their thoughts on the issues presented. When we started in July of 2011, the initiative was an immediate success and received uniformly positive evaluations of all that attended throughout the weeks. We have discussed relevant issues such as the anaplastic large-cell lymphoma breast implant scandal, followed the ongoing U.S. Food and Drug Administration debates on stem cells, and presented the highlights of national and international meetings we have attended, to name a few. Also, by receiving constant updates of new, most-viewed, or e-mailed articles from scientific journals such as the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery,3 the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, and the European Journal of Plastic Surgery, all linked to Facebook, we were able to streamline and share information that we thought would be of great interest to our audience. This initiative represents one of many opportunities through which social networking can keep us apprised of the latest trends in our field. It could also serve as a complement for ongoing learning at other institutions. Alexandra Condé-Green, M.D. Luther Holton, III, M.D. Devinder P. Singh, M.D. Sheri Slezak, M.D. Division of Plastic Surgery, University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, Md. DISCLOSURE The authors have no financial conflicts of interest to disclose in relation to the content of this article. No outside funding was received. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors express their appreciation to Sara Kelly Glazer for help in the preparation of this work.