The E. Stanley Crawford critical issues forum at VAM 2024 in Chicago—which featured the tagline ‘Quality Care Everywhere’—underscored the importance of standards, infrastructure, personnel and verification programs in vascular surgery.
Multiple speakers throughout the session described vascular care as a “team sport,” alluding to the need for collaboration within individual centers. In addition, presenting experiences from one of the first inpatient centers to have utilized the SVS and American College of Surgeons’ (ACS) Vascular Verification Program, R. Clement Darling III, MD, said the program “allows you to feel proud of what we do as vascular surgeons.”
Following an introduction from then SVS President-elect, now President Matthew Eagleton, MD, the session also saw Clifford Ko, MD, discuss ACS quality initiatives and campaigns; Anton N. Sidawy, MD, outline the Vascular Verification Program (Vascular-VP) itself; and William P. Shutze Sr, MD, home in on how the program can be of help to outpatient centers.
Sidawy spoke of the need for vascular surgery to take charge of ensuring standards and handling its own verification processes, noting that “if we do not define it, someone else will define it for us.”
A salient message delivered by Ko was that centers with the correct standards and personnel—in short, those who “have it all set up”—tend to perform better. However, Sidawy later alluded to the fact that these criteria are not always met, hinting at disparities between vascular surgery and other specialties.
“Just go to your hospitals and look at two things,” he said. “Look at transplant and trauma, and see how much support they have. We would dream, as vascular surgery programs, of such support. And the reason they have this support is because, in order to be verified, that’s what they need to have—and this is one part of why we really wanted to embark on this verification program.”
Ko, speaking as the director of the ACS’ Division of Research and Optimal Patient Care, added: “We often are finding, in all of our care—cancer as well—that, in order to provide the level of care that we want to provide, we need to have those resources, those people there, in order to do the processes and in order to get the outcomes.
“This partnership together with the SVS and the vascular experts is really trying to identify those things to move us forward.”
