Forecast from your new editor
However, Vascular Specialist should not be considered only as a vehicle to provide new information. Rather it should also provide a voice for our specialty. It will be a place where our membership can come to learn about what our Society leadership is doing to promote our specialty. Within the pages devoted to SVS news we will have news from chairpersons of the various committees updating us on the committees' goals and achievements. Similarly, there will be updates from the regional societies as well as the American Venous Forum and the Society for Clinical Vascular Surgery.
It will also be a venue where we can inform SVS leaders about issues they may be able to improve. It will be a forum for our community where vascular surgeons can write about the problems facing us in our daily lives as practicing surgeons. Our new "Letters to the Editor" will become a venue for discussing all aspects of our specialty, from changing therapies to economic matters. If you have something you need to get off your chest, this is your forum!
We are the smallest recognized specialty in medicine and we are a close knit community. So in the new column "From The Vascular Community," Vascular Specialist will also offer an opportunity for us to update our colleagues about our comings and goings, our ups and downs, our life events and those of our families.
You are welcome to submit any relevant news item related to your life's progress or that of a colleague (assuming they agree!). It will be our print answer to Facebook for vascular surgeons. [If you are on Facebook, however, please visit and "like" our Vascular Specialist Facebook page. And we are on Twitter: @VascularTweets.]
As for most newspapers, print is expensive, and electronic media has become increasingly more appealing to publishers and you the reader. Accordingly, we will be redesigning our electronic version so that it can be easily accessed and read on multiple devices including your smart phone, tablet, or computer. News is happening every minute and our goal is to keep up. But print editions cannot.
So the print edition will still come out bimonthly and the electronic edition, which is published on the alternate months, will be sent to you by e-mail and published at www.vascularspecialistonline.com. But "breaking news" and new stories will be updated routinely between these issues in our online Top Stories section.
So join with us as we begin a new collaborative Vascular Specialist where you are reader, reporter, contributor and editorialist - a Vascular Specialist that represents the new breed of vascular surgeon and the new pro-active SVS. And a newspaper that provides news and commentary about all the events and issues that face vascular surgeons in an increasingly competitive yet exciting field of medicine.
Dr. Samson is a clinical associate professor of surgery (vascular), Florida State University Medical School, a member of Sarasota Vascular Specialists, Sarasota, Fl., and the new medical editor of Vascular Specialist.
