Our own Mark DeLegge, MD recently attended the Physician Nutrition Summit that addressed physician shortages in the practice of nutrition in the United States. This was a follow-up conference from the inaugural meeting on this topic in 2009, which had 41 participants. Both of these meetings were sponsored by Abbott Nutrition and organized by the American Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition. The proceedings from that conference were published in the recent November 2010 supplement of the Journal of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition. Dr. DeLegge was a lead or participating author in three of the summit’s articles in this supplement.
This recent meeting took place in December of 2010 in Chicago and brought back many of the original participants of last year’s summit in Orlando. Numerous societal organizations were represented such as the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American Society of Bariatric Medicine, the American Gastroenterological Association, the American Dietetic Association and the American Medical Association. Dr. DeLegge was one of four program chairs and led discussions focused on how to measure success of an intervention to solve the problem of physician shortage and what are the next steps to take to achieve this goal. The group as a whole flushed out issues of the group’s overall mission, the governance structure and the appropriate partners the group needed to establish to achieve its goals of approving physician attraction to the field of nutrition. In addition, the group was going to focus on measuring the problems of over-nutrition in the community and under-nutrition in the hospital as a mechanism of establishing the reason why more physicians are needed in nutrition support. Plans were made for an annual meeting and intermittent conference calls to ensure all members remained organized to the success of the project.
For more information on the Physician Nutrition Summit:
