Challenging, unpredictable experiences are intrinsic to our work as surgeons—but alongside these, we enjoy a yearly calendar with occasionally stable routines. Every July, we welcome new residents into surgical training and graduating residents into surgical practice. Every autumn, we enjoy Clinical Congress, the conference that is the ACS’s calling card to many surgeons worldwide.
As a resident, I aspired to have a paper or talk that would allow me to attend Clinical Congress. As an attending, I looked forward to Clinical Congress as a time of knowledge acquisition, skill-building, social connection, intellectual engagement, and meaningful reflection on our profession. I value this part of my fall routine, and I know many of you feel the same.
Clinical Congress must always evolve. It has, for over 100 years, been an ACS point of pride that this conference has something for surgeons in every discipline. We engage attendees in every career stage and practice configuration. Maintaining high standards and enhancing value involves steadily updating our offerings. For 2024 and the years to follow, we’ve made changes to help ensure we can best serve surgeons of all kinds.
Changes in 2024
This year, our conference returns to San Francisco, California. San Francisco has historically been our most highly attended conference city. Our first Clinical Congress there was in 1935. We have, this year, shifted the entire conference a day earlier, to a schedule of Saturday through Tuesday. This change has been considered for a few years, because anchoring the conference on the weekend allows many of our members to limit their days away from clinical practice to attend. We are pleased to make this change in response to the requests of so many of you. Clinical Congress will be from Saturday, October 19, to Tuesday, October 22. Convocation, including the initiation of new Fellows, will occur on Saturday evening, and the Opening Ceremony and Martin Memorial lecture will be on Sunday morning. We hope to see all of you at both events and throughout the conference.
Another concern was that sessions for specific surgical disciplines or interests were often scattered throughout the 4-day program. We’ve begun to address that. While there will be sessions in all disciplines presented on all 4 days of this year’s conference, we have added six new thematic sessions focusing on education, quality, artificial intelligence, neurosurgery, cardiothoracic surgery, and vascular surgery, to better serve those interested in these areas. Furthermore, we have scheduled sessions with an interdisciplinary focus during 2 days to facilitate bringing together surgeons from many disciplines.
Rounding out our responsiveness to your feedback, we will adjust our schedule of Named Lectures. Four Named Lectures will be presented every year, and the other eight will move to an every-other-year rotation. We are also sunsetting the earliest (and most lightly attended) sessions of each day. Our hope is that you will avail yourselves of our early morning physical activity sessions and focus on enhancing your wellness in this way. We’ve also rescheduled the last session on the last day of the meeting to allow as many of you as possible to attend our Annual Business Meeting of Members. Please join us there.
Of course, we are keeping Taste of the City, our food-focused and family-friendly social gathering, as the final event of the conference. We hope to see you there too, and we remind you that the final day of the meeting encourages casual dress.
No matter what the schedule, we are focused on your safety and well-being in San Francisco and every city Clinical Congress visits. We have worked closely with officials, including at the conference venue and in the city government, to help ensure the security of all attendees during this year’s meeting.
Changes in 2025 and Beyond
Further improvements will come to Clinical Congress starting in 2025.
This year, we will maintain a 4-day format with the same approximate number of sessions on each day. This format is our long-standing tradition. Starting in 2025, in Chicago, Illinois (Saturday, October 4, to Tuesday, October 7), we’ll add to the convenience of thematic sessions by shifting to a format that places more content on Sunday and Monday, followed by a more tightly focused Tuesday. Since nearly all content will be available on demand within a few hours, this will facilitate active engagement in your most desired sessions, access to all content in all sessions, and efficiency of your time and travel.
On Sundays and Mondays, we will ensure maximum access through sessions arranged by surgical discipline. If you are in a discipline such as orthopaedic surgery, neurosurgery, urology, gynecologic surgery, pediatric, trauma, or transplant surgery, many of your sessions, as well as a significant proportion of general surgery will be positioned on these 2 days, as well as multidisciplinary clinical topics and professional education applicable to all surgeons.
Tuesdays cover a slightly smaller number of sessions on more specific and in-depth topics. We expect this new “triangular” format will enhance efficiency over our traditional “rectangular” one.
We’ve heard you tell us that taking time away from practice is challenging. Presenting the content for most disciplines in an efficient time span centered on a weekend helps us deliver maximum benefit with less time away from work.
Learn More
Read more about Clinical Congress 2024 in the feature article.
Update Your Profile
To provide you with the information you need and want, we’ve created an online Surgeon’s Dashboard with curated content specific to your surgical practice, career stage, and interests. To streamline your access to your most relevant content, update your profile on profile.facs.org with your interests.
Share Your Thoughts
Please tell us how you like the new format, share what sessions you’d like to see, and help us continue to make Clinical Congress the must-attend destination for you each autumn.
Register Now for Clinical Congress 2024
Of course, there is no greater way to understand the improvements we’re making than to see them yourself. Join us at Clinical Congress in San Francisco. Register now at Clinical Congress 2024.
