Hello CPOG Members,

This Fall/Winter newsletter comes to you at the end of a challenging 2020 due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. As the second wave continues throughout the country, we continue to work together with our local teams and our national organization to provide orthopaedic care, create educational opportunities, and pursue our research endeavours.

CPOG has seen our members adapt and innovate to provide high quality virtual conferences, webinars and other educational formats (such as the CPOG social organized by Dr. Tony Cooper this spring). The success of the virtual COA in July demonstrated that our community is strongly connected even when physically distanced. Thank you to everyone who participated as organizers, presenters, and audience members. We had hoped to be able to reconvene in person in 2021, however current and anticipated public health recommendations have led to the decision to proceed with a virtual annual COA meeting for June 15-19, 2021. The conference will consist of 4 evenings of online education plus 1 day of hybrid programming streamed from Vancouver. The CPOG subspecialty program will be released closer to the meeting date. Registration opens in 2021.

The Ste-Justine Pediatric Orthopaedic Review Course (SPORC) 2021 is also virtual this coming year. The course consists of two online educational formats. First, short video presentations on various pediatric orthopedic topics will be available online. Second, graduating residents will have the opportunity to participate in virtual small group sessions moderated by staff surgeons on February 19, 2021. Registration and more course information is available at : https://event.fourwaves.com/sporc2021/pages. Please share this link with your residents.

Want to advertise a job? Want to look for a job? Do you have a new colleague? Have you started practice or relocated to a new job? Please share your job news with CPOG at cpogresearch@gmail.com. For example, Dr. Megan Cashin recently relocated from London, ON where she enjoyed many years of work, to St. John’s, NL. She continues her paediatric orthopaedic practice at the Janeway Children’s Health & Rehabilitation Centre. If you have similar news, we will post it to our website or share it in the newsletter at your request. This information helps us to follow our members and strengthen our networking platform. We look forward to hearing from you.

CPOG would still like to get to know more of our members. Thanks to those of you who have already responded to our request for member information. This information will be used to allow us to better collaborate on patient care, CPOG events and research. Please follow this link to complete the short form. We promise it will take less than 5 minutes: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FC6TRCR

Do you have events, news or photos to share? CPOG is now on Twitter. We encourage all members to use the Twitter handle @CPOG_Ca when tweeting relevant comments, announcements and photos.

And finally, we invite CPOG members to reach out if interested in getting involved or sharing information about your work. We’d love to highlight our members and their accomplishments. We also have an active WhatsApp chat among members, in which we discuss cases, conferences and stay in touch. Please email us to be added to the group.