Event Spotlight: CSM 2020
Earlier this month, Jason Hubbard attended the Combined Sections Meeting (CSM) of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) here in Denver at the Colorado Convention Center. This year, the conference was attended by over 18,000 physical therapists and physical therapist assistants, making it the best-attended physical therapy conference ever in the United States! Attending conferences like this is an important part of our dedication as PT’s to stay current and relevant - as such, we thought it might be helpful to give a breakdown of what this conference involved and why we thought it was important that we send someone from our practice to attend.
What is CSM?
The Combined Sections Meeting brings together the APTA’s various sections (including sports, pediatrics, neurology, oncology, etc.) for a multi-day conference. Each section is devoted to a particular branch of practice and serves to organize, advocate, and educate within that specialty. CSM consists of 400+ educational sessions offered by leaders in the PT community that are grounded in research and clinical practice. The majority of these sessions are research-focused, while some feature patients presenting testimonials and insights from their experiences in PT. Given our practice, we focused primarily on high-level educational sessions from the orthopedic, sports, and pediatric sections.
The conference lasts 3 days, with a variety of pre-conference sessions held beforehand. Other activities include alumni events for various PT educational programs and a slew of social events. All in all, CSM offers a fantastic opportunity for PT’s to stay updated, expand their networks, and build a stronger, better-informed, more patient-centered practice.
Why go to CSM?
Our staff at CSPT is devoted to maintaining a high level of practice, which involves staying current with new research and methodologies. CSM allows us to do this through the educational sessions; it also presents an opportunity to meet with researchers and clinicians from around the country to network, share insights, and grow professionally. The combination of lecture-style sessions and direct communications with current researchers lends itself to a broad understanding of the current state of our practice.
In our specific practice, we see athletes across the spectrum from casual to professional, young and old, in a wide variety of sports and activities. As such, attending CSM was a great way to get the latest and greatest information to help our athletes recover from injury, prevent future injury, and get stronger, faster, and better at their sport. Specifically, several of the sessions offered this year focused on runners, which is a good portion of our patient population; another session focused on return to sport testing for individuals who have had a leg injury. In addition, Jason attended a session on combat sports, which was of particular interest to him as a former full-contact kickboxer. Lastly, he went to a session covering the rehabilitation and performance of overhead athletes, which includes baseball, tennis, and volleyball players. The information presented in these sessions has already given our team fresh insight into how we can better our practice and further help our patients, whatever their sport, background, or age.
Curious about what else we picked up on? Drop us a comment on SoMe!