5 Keys for Making the Most of a Convention

When you're a health care professional, student, or faculty, you owe it to yourself and your profession to attend pertinent conventions each year. Figuring out which sessions to attend at that convention, though, can be daunting.

Here are five tips to help you maximize your learning at a professional conference.

#1  Plan ahead

Check your association's website two weeks before the event and download the agenda. It should be available by then. Highlight all the sessions you want to attend, whether at the same time or not.

After highlighting your favorites, rank them in order of preference. Maybe your first choice will end up being canceled. Ranking your choices will allow you to quickly move to your second choice without reviewing again all the options in that time slot.

#2  Read descriptions carefully

Pay attention to the description of each session. Session titles can be deceiving. It seems that many speakers want their titles to be cute or funny, and that's fine, but those titles may not spell out exactly what the content will be.

Pay attention to adjectives that describe the content. For instance, if a description reads, "Learn simple techniques for handing conflicts," you can bet the session won't dig into conflict resolution but instead cover just the basics.

#3  Don't believe the descriptions

I speak often at conferences, and I know that as much as I plan ahead, there are times I don't have the full content of the workshop finished until shortly before the convention. Unless a speaker gives the same presentation over and over, they probably don't finalize it until near the convention too.

That means that the description the speaker gave the association ahead of time may change before the conference. Sometimes it changes only a little, but sometimes it changes a lot.

Make sure to review the final program when you register at the convention to make sure that the session still meets your needs.

#4  Check out the speakers

Identify the top two or three sessions you really want to see, and then evaluate the speaker. If you know the speaker already and like him or her, great, move on.

But if you don't, do an online search of the speaker to learn more about them. Let's say you'll be attending a session by a university professor. Go to www.ratemyprofessor.com and see if you can find the person's name.

If you see comments suggesting that the person is, um, less than dynamic, you might want to choose another session.

#5  See the sights

Make sure to leave some time to take in a few of the sights in the convention city. If you're in, say, Nashville (where I am as I write this), I'd recommend visiting the Grand Ole Opry. I mean, how can you not?

Get out of the convention hotel and find somewhere great to eat. Use UrbanSpoon, Yelp, TripAdvisor, or some other site to find a place where the locals go. Get a flavor for the area because, well, who knows when you'll be back?

What Goes Into the Front Matter of a Textbook?

Every health care textbook publisher has its own sequence of front matter pieces, but there are only subtle differences.

Front matter, by the way, is everything from the inside front cover of the book to the page 1 of the body of the book. Front matter pages are typically (dare I say always?) lowercase Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv, etc.).

Full list

• Half-title page
• Series title or frontispiece (verso, or left-facing page)
• Title page
• Copyright page (verso)
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contributors
• Reviewers
• Acknowledgments
• (List of) Tables
• (List of) Figures
• Abbreviations
• Contents in Brief
• (Table of) Contents
• Introduction

Most common

These elements are the most commonly used, and a few are pretty much mandatory:

• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page (verso)
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contributors
• Reviewers
• Acknowledgments
• (Table of) Contents

For more information on front matter and book layouts, check this great page (and site):
http://andreareider.com/2011/01/23/the-basics-of-book-design/http://andreareider.com/2011/01/23/the-basics-of-book-design/

PAs by Any Other Name...

One of the markets I serve, physician assistants, is currently going through some rough times as a profession. There have been discussions for many years about "Assistant" in the title Physician Assistant. The professional association for PAs, the American Academy of Physician Assistants, has held numerous discussions, debates, and votes about changing the title, but consensus has so far been impossible to achieve.

The last few years have been particularly rancorous, it seems to me, with debates raging on the Physician Assistant Forum, Facebook, and even Clinical Advisor, most recently with a wonderful article by Jim Anderson, MPAS, PA-C, DFAAPA, ATC, called, "A new vision for the AAPA."

Jim asked for feedback on the topic from PAs for Tomorrow and received a number of sensible suggestions, including this one:

"Market us as PAs, not as Physician Assistants. Anything we can do to diminish 'assistant,' even if we don't end up at associate, is a positive change."

I thought I might be able to shed a bit of light on this subject from the point of view of an author, editor, publisher, and nurse. A linguistic bit of light, if you will.

Let's take the title one word at a time.

Physician

In traditional medicine there are two preeminent models, the medical model and the nursing model. Nursing has been highly consistent in their, let's call them, naming conventions.

For instance, when the NP arrived on scene in 1965, through the University of Colorado's groundbreaking program, Nursing "decided" to call them Nurse Practitioners. That is, whoever coined the term nurse practitioner, whether it was Loretta Ford, RN, or her partner at UC Henry K. Silver, MD, the profession adopted the term and made it real. It likewise made real advanced practice nurse, nurse midwife, and nurse anesthetist, consistently using "nurse" in the title.

Eugene Stead

When Eugene Stead, MD, formed the first PA program in 1965 at Duke University, he too, like Ford and Silver, was reacting to a shortage in physicians. Unlike the NP movement, though, there were at the time three iterations, by my count, of the PA:

1. Physician Assistant
2. Physician Associate
3. Medex

It took some time for the profession to make PA real, and the effects are still being felt. The title Physician Assistant does, though, indicate consistency in medical model, just as Nurse Practitioner does with the nursing model.

Assistant

Unfortunately the PA profession didn't have the benefit, from a purely linguistic view, of using practitioner to distinguish them from physicians. To call a PA a "physician practitioner" would have been redundant and unclear.

Associate, I think, was better but still not quite right.

What other descriptors might work? Well, there aren't many.

• Colleague? Rather vague.
• Collaborator? Sounds like a co-conspirator.
• Ally? Oh, please.
• Representative? Adjunct? Adjuntant? No, no, and definitely no.

There just aren't words out there that meet all the needs of the profession.

Now what?

As I see it, PAs have three basic options:

1. Stay with the status quo. [Hate it.]
2. Use a  different term that more accurately identifies what PAs actually do, whether it's physician associate, advanced medical provider, Medex, or some other term as yet unknown. [We haven't found an acceptable term yet, and I doubt we will.]
3. Do what the reader from PAs for a Future suggested. Stick it out with PA, meaning Physician Assistant, but make it much harder for people five years from now, people who have never heard the term physician assistant, to find out what PA means. The thinking here is that if you use the abbreviation consistently but almost never use the full term, people will eventually forget the full term and recognize the profession purely by the abbreviation.

It's that latter course I recommend. Here's how I might implement it:

• Revise association names and logos to delete "Physician Assistant" and instead use "PA."

• Change web copy and copy in other documents to  PA instead of spelling it out, but leave it spelled out in selected documents and web pages. Make the user look for the spelled out name.
• Replace PA in all instances within the profession's own lexicon, and then "push" that lexicon out to the public at all pertinent points.

It might take time, and it will certainly take money and effort, but I'm not sure, at this point in the growth of the profession, whether there are other viable options.

From my purely linguistic view, of course.

Can We Please Stop Using Impact as a Verb?

People in health care really shouldn't be using impact as a verb, as in, "Patient care is impacted by staffing shortages."

Really?

I mean, health care people know what that word means, and they still use it? Wow.

Enough, already. Impact is a noun, as in, "Staffing shortages can have a significant impact on patient care." If you want to use a verb that's similar, use affect.

And while we're at it...

If you're like literally giving patient care or writing about people who literally do, you owe it to yourself to like stop using literally instead of figuratively.

Yes, yes, I know that Merriam-Webster, MacMillan, and even Cambridge dictionaries have sanctioned the use of literally as a synonym for figuratively, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still sound stupid.

Just get to the point. Rather than saying, "The patient was literally vomiting all morning," just say she was vomiting all morning.

Like, okay?

NO FAIR! Three Steps for Avoiding Plagiarism

Plagiarism is far more common in textbook publishing than you might think, even health care educational publishing.

Plagiarism refers to the copying of someone else's work for your own purposes without giving proper attribution.

If you didn't say it, write it, draw it, or research it, it isn't yours to use.

Authors who probably should know better pick up content from a resource and then place it word-for-word, or nearly so, into their manuscript. The publisher does its best, of course, to identify such instances and to steer the authors away from that nefarious activity.

The majority of instances of plagiarism in educational publishing, I believe, stem from a lack of knowledge of the doctrine of fair use.The U.S. Copyright Office identifies four factors in determining fair use:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

In general, works that use only a small amount of someone else's work — such as a quotation or in-line definition — are probably staying within the bounds of fair use, so the work can stay as is.

But picking up whole passages or entire tables, charts, or graphs? No way. That absolutely falls under the term plagiarism.

So, how can you avoid inadvertently plagiarizing someone's work? Here are three tips.

Tip #1  Use your own head, not someone else's

Most textbook authors write with two, three, or maybe four source books splayed around them as they type. They dip into the books as needed for clarity and then write what they've learned in their own words.

That's the way it's supposed to go. The way it's not supposed to go is to splay those books around, dip into the for information, and then write the same stuff you just read into your own own document.

So, get the info into your head and then out again with your own take on it.

Tip #2  Use the concept, not the words 

There's absolutely nothing wrong with looking at, understanding, even admiring the way someone has described a particular concept. It's too easy, though, to go from admiration to imitation.

It's unacceptable to say, well, that description of blood flow through the heart can't be written any better, so I'll just use it myself.

No, that just won't do. Write it again in your own words. You might surprise yourself at how much better your description is over that other one!

Tip #3  Use your own organization 

Let's say you find a list of adverse reactions for a drug in someone else's book, and you're tempted to use the same list. Don't pick up the sequence, change it around and reword the reactions as much as possible.

For example, here's a list of adverse reactions you find in a book you're using as a resource:

• Palpitations 
• Anxiety
• Headache
• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Tinnitus

Don't just copy that list. Double-check another source to see if other adverse reactions might be applicable, and if so, put them in the list. Is "headache" too general? Can you find evidence to support, oh, I don't know, "headache, most often frontal"? Then use that.

Once your list is complete, alphabetize it. Or list the reactions by word length, from shortest to longest. Do something different to make the list your own.

Just know that the work you do now to make your book your own could save you money — lots of it — down the road. Any plagiarism in your work could be grounds for a forfeiture of earned royalties, depending on your contract, or even future earnings.

GUEST BLOG: Grant 'Permission' to Let Go

Every now and then I post an essay from another blogger or author, and I'm proud to do so again today. Sharon Eagle has authored three books for my company, F.A. Davis, and is one of the most caring, intelligent, and gracious people I've ever known, never mind being a remarkable writer.

Sharon has cancer, one that can't be cured. She has been open and honest about it since day one, and the following post is an example not only of her eloquence but also of her compelling perspective on her illness. It is yet another reason why she's one of my very favorite people and will ever be so.

Grant 'Permission' to Let Go

One of the many things I’ve pondered in the time since my diagnosis is the term we hear so often about patients “fighting” against cancer and sometimes “losing their battle” with cancer. The following represents only my own personal thoughts and viewpoint on the matter.

There’s something about the term “fighting” that bugs me when it comes to cancer. But I haven’t figured out exactly why or what term I’d substitute for it. I suspect to most people the term “fight” indicates some sort of physical battle. Yet in my experience, the fight often feels more like an emotional or mental process than a physical one used in reference to the desire that the ill person not give up or give in.

All things considered, I’m doing well and have exceeded my doctor’s expectations. For this I am grateful. Yet on occasion I feel so tired, physically and emotionally, that I can see how a person may arrive at the point that he or she just can’t do it any more. When this time comes, loved ones need to know that the best gift they can offer may be to allow their ill loved one the space to move on with aided comfort of hospice instead of begging them to keep “fighting.” When one's physical, mental, and emotional resources are exhausted, it can feel so difficult, impossible even, to “keep fighting.” Yet ill persons often fear letting their loved ones down and keep on trying.

I realize that I’m treading on sacred ground and that everyone’s situation is different. I also know first hand, what this may cost loved ones. I will never forget the intense pain it cost me and my family when we gave my brother “permission” to go (die), if that’s what he needed to do, even though we wanted him to stay with all our hearts. It was the most difficult, one-sided conversation I’ve ever had. But I remembered countless times as a nurse that my patients seemed to hang on beyond all reason as their family begged and pleaded for them to stay and get well when there was no medical hope of healing. As a sister I realized that it is far more difficult (than I ever appreciated as a nurse) to walk the fine line between realism and hope.

I simply hope in this writing to convey the notion that death isn’t necessarily the “loss” of a “battle,” and that it doesn’t mean the patient has failed. They may in fact be at the very jumping-off point of mankind’s greatest adventure.

So when my time comes I hope people don’t talk about me in terms of fighting or, worse, losing a battle with cancer. I prefer they comment on how I lived without giving so much credit to cancer as a powerful foe that won some victory over me.

I’m in no hurry to go, and yet I no longer fear dying. Further I don’t believe my death will be any sort of failure, but rather a transition to what comes next. And I think what comes next will be pretty awesome.

— Sharon Eagle