Warm and Welcoming: Is It What We Say or How We Say It?
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EDITORIAL – HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH AND GLOBAL ONCOLOGY
Warm and Welcoming: Is It What We Say or How We Say It? Herbert J. Zeh, MD, Sandra L. Wong, MD, and Martin J. Heslin, MD Department of Surgery, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL
As those responsible for the future design and implementation of the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) annual conference (H.J.Z. and M.J.H. as Chair and Vice Chair of the Scientific Program Committee, respectively), we read with great interest the article in this issue of Annals of Surgical Oncology evaluating unconscious bias in speaker introductions. Stewart et al.1 performed an observational study of video-archived introductions from the 2018 and 2019 SSO annual conferences, having previously noted gender biases at other large national meetings. Specifically, this work mirrors a recent study by Duma and colleagues which defined a ‘‘professional introduction’’ as one in which the speaker’s professional title, followed by the speaker’s full name or last name, was used2. It is worth noting the innovative use of video review in this study. As a larger society, we have seen the impact that review of events captured real-time by video has on studying performance in complex situations and environments. Indeed, there is a growing body of literature that supports the power of video review for the assessment of surgical skill in the operating room3–5 as well as critical review of calls made on the field of play. Work in the operating room has established an association between technical performance and clinical outcomes and has implications for quality metrics and continuous quality improvement. Here, video review is used to evaluate the
Ó Society of Surgical Oncology 2020 First Received: 6 July 2020 Accepted: 8 July 2020 M. J. Heslin, MD e-mail: [email protected]
performance of moderators during scientific sessions, with a focus on ‘‘nonprofessional’’ forms of speaker introductions. First, it was gratifying that the authors did not find evidence of gender bias across nearly 500 speaker introductions at recent SSO annual meetings. In fact, the study concluded that the moderator used a nonprofessional introduction in just under 1/3 of the introductions. This finding was observed to be more common for speakers who were trainees and in moderators as they increased in academic rank. The authors do point out that one of the limitations of their analysis is the inability to assess the familiarity between the moderator and the presenter. This is an important point to explore further since the power of familiarity between the moderators and the speakers cannot be underestimated. We would submit that, for many disease sites, the more senior the members become, the more likely they are to be known. This is supported by the authors’ observation that the association of ‘‘nonprofessional’’ introductions was strongest in the melanoma/ sarcoma sessions, in which there are a relatively small circle of content experts. Indeed, for the authors to assume that a negative connotation such
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