President's Message

Dear Colleagues,

I am truly humbled and honoured to be appointed President of the Canadian Society for Vascular Surgery. I hope to live up to the precedent set by my forebearers. I want to thank Dr. Karim Alibhai, the outgoing president, for his excellent leadership during another challenging pandemic year. His visionary talk on the future of Artificial Intelligence in medicine and surgery at the Annual Meeting was thought-provoking and insightful. I also want to thank last year’s program chair Dr. Fadi Elias and assistant program chair Dr. Vic Vucemilo who organized and hosted an excellent virtual meeting with over 240 participants and 30 scientific talks, showcasing the fantastic and cutting-edge research being done across the country! Our invited guest, Dr. Tara Mastracci, gave two inspiring presentations. Particularly moving was the one touching on the massive impact social deprivation has on medicine and its profound effect on the outcomes of vascular patients. This talk serves as a good reminder of how important these societal determinants of health are to our vascular patients.

This is an exciting time for the CSVS and its members, as our Society slowly emerges under the shadow of a difficult pandemic and hopefully regains some semblance of normalcy; the executive committee is busy developing and implementing new initiatives that will help fulfill the Society’s strategic mission and improve our footprint as the go-to experts in comprehensive vascular care. Initiated by President-Elect, Dr. John Harlock, the CSVS hosted its first national journal club on September 14, 2021. This virtual event was extremely well-attended and received. The next national, virtual, journal club will take place on November 23 and is accredited for Royal College MOC credits, I hope many of you will participate! Another new initiative put forward by our Society’s webmaster, Dr. Varun Kapila, is a CSVS podcast. The initial episode is a discussion of carotid artery disease and its management by fellow CSVS executives, Dr. Harlock and Education Chair, Dr. Greg Harding. This podcast will be available on our website and I encourage everyone to give it a listen. The plan is to feature new episodes on diverse topics relevant to our specialty by various discussants from our membership.

Plans are now underway to host an (hopefully) in-person Annual Meeting in Vancouver on September 9 and 10, 2022. We are also working on having a CME-dedicated half day on the Thursday afternoon which would also be a first for the Society. This promises to be a special meeting as we have not had the opportunity to gather since 2019. Paired with these educational initiatives is the hard work of the research committee. The research group’s first paper was just published in this September’s issue of the Journal of Vascular Surgery, it being one of the largest multi-centre EVAR explant series. The second project, under the leadership of Research Chair Dr Heather Gill, is a prospective study of patients with juxtarenal aneurysms and has so far recruited 58 patients from 10 sites, with 8 more sites in the process of being added to the study. I encourage anyone wanting to participate in this research project to reach out to Dr Gill. The CSVS guidelines initiative being led by Dr Kapila is close to finalizing its manuscript on the management of venous disease, with ongoing work on both carotid and vascular-lab guidelines.

With these new initiatives, and ongoing committee work, our Society has made significant progress in fulfilling its strategic mission. I look forward to serving the Society and its members over the next year and thank my predecessors for giving me this opportunity.

Sincerely,

Luc Dubois, MD, MSc, FRCSC
President Canadian Society for Vascular Surgery