90th AATS President Alec Patterson, MD President, AATS Washington University School of Medicine St. Louis, Missouri

What Membership Means to Me

Throughout our careers as surgeons we become members of a host of professional organizations, from our local and state medical societies to national and international specialty organizations. We join these organizations to participate in educational opportunities in our specialty. These opportunities help each of us build upon the foundation established by our mentors to maintain the health of our specialty. Many of us take the lessons learned in these organizations and share them with the next generation of surgeons we are currently mentoring to ensure that the specialty remains strong.

In addition to the sponsored scientific meetings and publications, another key benefit of membership in professional organizations is the personal interaction with our colleagues. Memberships require both a commitment of time and financial resources, and, in this era of increasingly competitive demands, we might question the value in continuing our participation.

Organizations such as AATS are an integral and valuable part of my professional life. In addition to the opportunity to attend scientific sessions which keep me up to date on cutting edge changes in thoracic surgery, I have an opportunity to interact on a personal level and build relationships with colleagues from different parts of North America and throughout the world. This enables me to share with them my experiences in caring for patients with thoracic diseases and to learn from them new and appropriate approaches in the practice of thoracic surgery.

AATS is a unique organization with a clearly defined set of core values which include Leadership, Scholarship, Mentoring, Integrity and Professionalism and Quality Patient Care. International in scope, with almost 20% of our 1,200 members practicing outside North America, AATS enables its members to establish world-wide collegial relationships. Each of us benefits through our shared experiences and bring back new ideas to our own institutions.

AATS membership is comprised of accomplished surgeons who have devoted their lives to the core values of the association and believe strongly in its mission of promoting scholarship in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery. Its members are leaders in our specialty and strive to assure that those they train will become their successors in leadership roles. They are committed to scholarship through the presentation and publication of their own collaborative research and patient care modalities, sharing their findings with their colleagues. Each serves as a mentor for young surgeons as they make their way through the years of training and education required in our specialty and strives to provide daily optimal patient care to those suffering from cardiothoracic diseases. Mentoring clearly benefits young surgeons as evidenced by the recent dramatic increase in funding to young cardiothoracic investigators, particularly those who have participated in the AATS Research Scholarship program.

In addition to offering a venue for this interchange of ideas and information, AATS provides its membership and the profession with the most respected scientific journal in our field, THE JOURNAL OF THORACIC AND CARDIOVASCULAR SURGERY, and three critically acclaimed affiliate publications, Seminars in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Operative Techniques in Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery and Pediatric Cardiac Annual. Finally, Thoracic Surgery News, the monthly publication dedicated to sharing news and updates in our specialty, includes an association overview each month highlighting activities of interest not only to our members but to the specialty as a whole.

In addition to published resources, members receive complimentary registration to the AATS Annual Meeting which this year includes expanded Skills Workshops, new sessions on “Professionalism”, “Robotics”, “Critical Care” and an EBUS hands-on course, as well as reduced registration fees to a series of educational activities through the association’s involvement in co-sponsorship or support of other institutional and organizational continuing education programs.

For those of us in cardiothoracic surgery, there is a host of organizations to which one might belong. AATS continually addresses my professional spheres of interest by its SAGR committee’s involvement in improving surgical representation on NIH Study Sections and its successful efforts to increase research funding, by its Education Committee which has broadly expanded our national and international involvement in continuing education and by its Council’s innovative approach to developing the next generation of academic leaders in CT surgery through its sponsorship of the AATS Academy last year in Boston and again this coming May in Toronto.

Membership has its privileges and I am honored to be a member of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and to serve as its President.

Past Presidents