Dr. Mara Holton’s takeaways from the 2023 LUGPA Annual Meeting

In this video, Mara R. Holton, MD, shared takeaways from the 2023 LUGPA Annual Meeting session “Empowering women in urology” as well as the political affairs update. Holton is a urologist with AAUrology in Annapolis, Maryland and serves on the LUGPA board of directors.

Transcription:

What were some takeaways from the LUGPA 2023 session "Empowering women in urology?"

This was a great experience, and it was the inaugural year of that session. Overall, I was very galvanized by the amount of enthusiasm and interest. The biggest takeaway is the desperate need for this type of engagement and conversation. There were just a number of people in the audience who really felt the time had come. One of the issues that was the most embracedhad to do with the need for meaningful maternity and paternity policies; so essentially, family leave practices within practices. Another area in which we focused was leadership development. We had a fantastic speaker from industry, who spoke about mentorship and sponsorship as critical ingredients for the progression of anyone within a practice, but again, specifically as it related to women. That was really, really good information.

What were some of the regulatory and legislative issues discussed during the political affairs update?

As always, we focused on our pillars of reform: site neutrality, leveling the playing field, and patient access. This year in particular, we really attempted to highlight a novel conversation about financial toxicity, which is really the burden of health care costs on patients and their families, particularly patients who receive advanced oncology treatments. This is gaining a lot of attention in the literature as well as in practices and in the epidemiologic and medical economics community. We at the annual meeting focused really exhaustively on the critical contribution that our members make. Our members are heard. The goal is really to broaden engagement across all practices with the HPPA apparatus at LUGPA and for folks to understand how they can engage and how meaningful that engagement can be.

This transcription was edited for clarity.