Interview with Past President Prof. Juan C. Celedón

ATS meeting 2021 addresses health disparities in respiratory disease

 Conducted June 2021 by Dr Susanne Kammerer

Prof. Juan C. Celedón is Immediate Past President of the American Thoracic Society (ATS) and the Niels K. Jerne Professor of Paediatrics and Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh and Division Chief of Pulmonary Medicine at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

What are the advantages of an online congress and what do you miss compared with the classic on-site event?

The obvious advantage of the virtual format is that one can reach a larger international audience as it is easier for people from abroad to participate. Last I checked, we had about 47% of international registrants. The second advantage is the on-demand feature. If you are attending an in-person meeting, either you attend a session, or you don’t. In contrast, with most of the sessions available on demand until 2 July, people can watch whichever sessions they are interested in on their own schedule.

Of course, what the majority of participants look forward to the most, is the in-person interaction. We made a great effort to provide this possibility on the virtual format as much as we could (e.g, with question-and-answer sessions and possibilities for interactions with the speakers), but I would say it is not the same as an in-person meeting.

What have been the most interesting sessions at ATS 2021 for you?

My entire career has been on research in minority populations and so I was very pleased to see the number of sessions about issues related to disparities in respiratory diseases. When you look at the programme, there was a high number of sessions addressing racism, health disparities related to race or ethnicity, the role of gender and sex, and research in those fields. This was all quite interesting to me.

What do you think are/were the biggest challenges for clinicians during the pandemic?

I think that at the height of the pandemic, depending on where you were in the world, you dealt with a tremendously increased workload and in some settings with limited resources, whether in staffing, supplies, or treatment. I think it was devastating for many of our colleagues to lose patients to COVID-19 in an intensive care unit (ICU) without their family around or, if possible at all, only by zoom. Moreover, clinicians were socially isolated, which added to their toll, particularly for those working in ICUs. Besides, everybody but particularly women and younger people have had to deal with the closure of in-person attendance at schools and thus increased pressure at home, while also having to manage an increased clinical workload. For physician-scientists, all the pressures posed by the pandemic may have negatively impacted their time for research.

How do you reach your patients with chronic diseases in this difficult time?

I would be afraid to generalise, but some hospitals have switched to virtual consults relatively quickly. Even as conditions improved, patients were still reluctant to take in-person visits because of their fear of COVID-19. Thus, I think in many countries, regions, and cities, patients and physicians have tried to do telemedicine appointments. This has been necessary and has worked to some extent, particularly for routine and non-complex visits. However, many patients miss face-to-face contact with their physicians.

So, what is your opinion on virtual contact/telemedicine?

COVID-19 has been a great accelerator in clinical care and education, including the broader adoption of telemedicine. Early in the pandemic, the ATS co-led a series of webinars with our peer societies around the world, which had a very high attendance because clinicians wanted to have the latest information on the prevention, diagnosis, and management of COVID-19. Indeed, the virtual (webinar) format for education has been very valuable to clinicians worldwide during the pandemic. As noted above, telemedicine has gained its rightful place in patient care and consultation work, allowing discussion of cases with our colleagues around the globe.

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Posted on 5 July 2021