Introduction - 2024 Pediatric Bariatric Surgery Update Course

Well, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everybody, and welcome to the 2024 pediatric bariatric surgery update course. Uh, we have a great show for you today. I wanna start out by, uh, thanking Laurie Children's, Akron Children's, and ProCare Consultants along with our corporate sponsors, Medtronic and Teleflex for, uh, helping us put this on. Uh, I'm Mark Wolcon. I'm the chair of Surgery at Akron Children's Hospital and I am a pediatric bariatric surgeon. Uh, I'm joined by my co-hosts here, Tom Inge and Stephanie Walsh. Uh, I'll pass it off to Stephanie right now. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for coming. I'm, I'm really excited for the show. I think we've got some great topics to cover. I'm Stephanie Walsh. I was a pediatrician and did pediatric weight management at Children's Healthcare Atlanta for the past 15+ years, and now have joined with Evan Nadler at ProCare Consultants, and we're looking to help programs develop, grow, and become accredited so we can get some of these really good programs out there across the country. I doubt it. Yeah, and I'm Tom Inge, um, Chair of Surgery and Surgeon in Chief at Lour Children's Hospital. Really pleased to be here today with these two awesome co-hosts, um, who have been in the, the obesity space and, uh, pediatric, bariatric surgery, um, for a long, long time. So, um, I also wanted to give a shout out to, uh, the, the sponsors, Medtronic and Teleflex Standard bariatrics. Um, it's really nice to be a surgeon, uh, today where we've got, uh, we've got options. Um, we've got two companies that are very dedicated to creating those options and trying to help us do the best, uh, for safe and, uh, effective patient care. So, um, with that, um, uh, I actually am also the surgical director of the bariatric program here at Laurie and I'm honored to be able to, um, introduce, uh, our medical director as well, um, as, uh, She will be the, the first speaker, but before that, uh, Mark, uh, do we have any other, uh, intro comments or, um, uh, things that we need to, to convey? Sure, just, just a few housekeeping things. Uh, sure. So whenever we do these shows, I always say that something will go on, something will glitch. Uh, we've suffered through power outages and lightning storms and all kinds of things like that, and the show does go on. So if something happens, you can just, you know, what I want you to do is first, Restart your browser and try to log back in, that sometimes will fix things. If not, wait there and be patient, and oftentimes we will be back. Hopefully, nothing will happen, but it just seems like there's always something when you're online for this long. Uh, also, uh, you can, uh, you know, part of this is really about the, the Interactions. So if you have questions or anything else, yeah, I think you can put them in a Q&A there, uh, and feel free to ask that and we'll try to answer them online. And after there's a presentation, uh, so we're gonna do the presentations, there'll be discussions. If you have further questions to one of the presenters, feel free to put that in the chat and we will try to answer those offline and that'll keep going. But we have a great faculty today with some really fantastic talks for you, uh, and I look forward to it.