President’s Message

Abstract

I cannot believe how fast this year is going! This is my third JAVA message for the year with just one more to go. There is so much good work going on in AVA that I am excited to share.First, if you haven’t yet registered for the AVA Scientific Meeting in Portland, OR, October 14–17, there is still time. I love the Pacific Northwest, and the conference is lining up to be a great one. There are several premeeting sessions with hands-on opportunities to learn new skills. We have a wonderful keynote speaker coming to talk to us about the future of health care and lots of great breakout sessions filled with learning opportunities. We are bringing back some of your favorite elements of the Scientific Meeting and will introduce a few new things as well.In the last issue of Intravascular Quarterly, I shared some incredible social media statistics. These are some of the data points we monitor on an ongoing basis as one of our measures of success as an association. We continue to see these numbers increase, and I wanted to remind you to like, comment, and share any time you see our social media posts. When you do that, you are helping us spread the gospel of vascular access and helping us have a greater impact. Someone in your circle of friends may connect with our message, whether they are on the clinical side or a patient or patient advocate. When AVA sends out messages to our members, we are preaching to the choir. When you share those messages, you are spreading those messages to an entirely different group, many of whom will appreciate the knowledge.Your AVA Board of Directors has continued to be busy. The transition to Talley is well under way, and we are beginning to make progress on projects in response to the feedback you gave us last fall. Our Network Task Force has sent out a survey and received some great feedback. One data point that I thought was both interesting and concerning was that 60% of our Networks feel they are doing well, and 40% of them are struggling. They have added Network Leaders to the Task Force and are beginning their work in developing strategies to replicate the best practices and support our struggling networks. Our Networks are the lifeblood of our organization, and our goal is to blow up those statistics and ensure that all Networks are doing well. We believe that there will be some quick wins but that there will also be some longer-term projects.We are making some changes to our Foundation Website to better represent their work and to explain the benefit of donating to this great cause. I know that many of you included donations to the Foundation when you registered for the Scientific Meeting, and I want to sincerely thank you for doing so. It is with those donations that the Foundation carries out their mission: To prevent vascular access patient harm using a total systems approach through patient safety initiatives, multidisciplinary alliances, research, and clinician education. If you would like to author a research article and are not sure where to start, contact our Foundation for support and mentoring at no cost to you. Together, we can attain our Foundation Vision of A world with safe and reliable vascular access.Work continues on our Clinical Practice Guidelines. Kudos to all the volunteers who are doing the diligent work of article review, evaluation, and guideline writing. This is a huge undertaking, and we are so appreciative of the experts from across the world who are volunteering their time to accomplish this task. Much remains to be done, but our goal is to publish the guidelines in late 2024.We have begun working on the issue of our relationships with other professional associations that are related or connected to the field of vascular access. We are developing a toolkit for your Board Members and Staff to use in their outreach and have begun scheduling initial discussion meetings.Finally, I would like to share some good news. We continue to see a 20% increase in attendance at our educational offerings in 2023 compared with 2022. The IV League Learning events have had good attendance and are great, quick, and easy learning opportunities for students and clinicians alike. With the help of the staff at Talley, we have been cleaning up duplicates in our membership list, but I am happy to report that our number of active members increased from 3534 in May 2022 to 4061 at May month end 2023. Help us push that number to 5000.See you in Portland!