CHEST 2022 Recap: Here’s What Our Attendees Had to Say

By: Katlyn Campbell
November 16, 2022

At CHEST 2022 in Nashville, learners were met with more than 300 education sessions and access to more than 700 expert faculty from around the world. A few attendees shared their experience.

Hands-on learning with simulation sessions

Attendees had the opportunity to choose from among 48 simulation sessions. These hands-on trainings provided learners with the ability to practice their skills on equipment they may have never used before.

Dolly Patel, DO, attended the session, Home Noninvasive Ventilation for Patients With Neuromuscular Disease, COPD, and Obesity Hypoventilation Syndrome, which was new in 2022.

“I'm a new attending. It’s been about 2 years that I've been in practice, and throughout training, throughout your practice, there are certain gaps you have. One of them is home noninvasive,” she said.

This simulation session allowed Dr. Patel to gain hands-on experience with devices and practice her skills troubleshooting so she could be prepared during real situations.

“Even something that simple where you're able to put your hands on the machine and do more of the physical part of it, that's the part that you don't learn so much by reading, by just going through your fellowship. It’s impossible for any training program to have all of these different types of machines and someone to show them to you,” she said.

Building empathy with patients

Two education sessions—Changing Patient Outcomes - 5 Minutes at a Time and Bridging Specialties™: Timely Diagnosis for ILD—highlighted important new CHEST initiatives.

At the First 5 Minutes^® session, attendees built their communication skills by participating in an interactive demonstration. Speaker, Calvin Chou, MD, also presented learners with a skills card featuring evidence-based strategies for establishing trust with patients.

As a first-time meeting attendee, Richard Shalmiyev, MD, said this session gave him ideas to take back into his own practice.

“Going into a patient room, in my experience, a lot of the time you're meeting people for the first time,” Dr. Shalmiyev said. “A minute is not an excessive amount of time to take in that patient interaction to get to know them and build rapport. So, to the best of my ability, I plan on using [these skills] with every new patient I come across in the future."

Learn more about the First 5 Minutes initiative, and access the skills card.

The Bridging Specialties™ session highlighted efforts by CHEST and Three Lakes Foundation to shorten the time to diagnosis for patients with interstitial lung diseases (ILDs), including the creation of a toolkit that includes an ILD-specific patient questionnaire, decision-making tool, and more. Learn more about this initiative, and access the recently launched toolkit.

A forum to share your work

Beyond attending sessions and learning from experts, some attendees presented their own work in the form of posters.

Corbett Walsh, MD, who specializes in pulmonary critical care and palliative care, was one of 659 people who presented their original investigation posters. His study was titled, “A pilot study to understand how physicians make end-of-life decisions for critically ill, unrepresented patients.”

Dr. Walsh chose to present his research at CHEST 2022 because “CHEST is one of the preeminent national societies for this specialty.”

“It’s an opportunity to share your work, as well as potentially collaborate with people who work in similar topics, but at other institutions that you wouldn't ever really have an opportunity to go meet or interact with,” Dr. Walsh said. “It’s also an opportunity to learn about interesting topics because you have content experts from all over the country and the world, and you may not have access to that either at your own institution if you're training or in your practice.”

CHEST 2022 also provided Dr. Walsh with an opportunity to hear from experts in more niche topic areas.

“One of my other interests is crisis standards of care and resource allocation,” he said. “There were some really phenomenal speakers on that. And that's another great example of something that's a bit smaller community of people who are interested in that. There have been some really fantastic speakers that I would a hundred percent never get an opportunity to hear speak.”

Start planning now to attend CHEST 2023 in Hawaiʻi, October 8-11, and you’ll also have the chance to build your technical skills, share your research, and hear from world-class experts who you won’t see anywhere else.