NELA Chapter Update: Collaborative Events to Keep NELA Strong in the Coming Year

The 2020-21 NELA Chapter was happy to co-sponsor this edition of the LipidSpin on Telehealth, and the NELA Chapter board would like to personally thank all NELA/ SELA contributors to this issue.

The NELA Chapter board and representatives came together for a conference call for the first time in the fall of 2020. We were not able to meet in person in June, so it was even more exciting to hear everyone’s voice and share ideas on how to raise the profile of the NLA in these unusual times. Educating local colleagues in lipidology and prevention was recognized as an enduring goal that’s more important than ever. We discussed the possibility of hosting a clinician webinar in 2021 that would feature evidence-based diet and lifestyle interventions (so important in the era of COVID-19) and that would also serve to highlight the NLA’s suite of patient handouts and keep clinicians coming back to our website as their #1 lipidology resource. We asked NELA representatives to continue to educate their trainees, colleagues, and other local stakeholders on lipids and prevention via local virtual lectures, articles, blogs, and social media, highlighting NLA statements and recommendations whenever possible. This is never a difficult ‘ask’ given the tremendous passion that exists in this organization.

NELA President-Elect Dr. Eugenia Gianos and colleagues at Northwell Health in NY had a running start on the education front starting in mid-2020. They organized their 4th Annual Northwell Health Advances in Cardiovascular Disease - From Prevention to Intervention Conference as a virtual event for the first time in late June 2020. Also in the education realm, NELA board member Dr. Merle Myerson from Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center is looking at ways to revive the venerable Boston-based New England Lipid Club using a virtual format. Finally, in the trainee education realm, NELA supported two lipid scholarship recipients in 2020: Dr. Shireen Khoury, MD, MPH from Johns Hopkins, and Dr. Josiah Bote, MD, from Hartford Hospital. The group voted to donate one-half of the remaining funds to the Foundation of the NLA’s patient education efforts.

Growing and engaging NELA members is another major goal of the Chapter in 2020- 21. Thanks to NELA Secretary and PharmD Roda Plakogiannis, NELA membership grew significantly in 2019-20, and we hope we can continue this trend. We’re asking all NELA members to encourage RDNs, PharmDs, APPs, trainees, and early career faculty and community practitioners to become NLA members. We’re also planning to have at least one virtual meetand-greet in 2021 to make sure every NELA member has a mentor and feels supported and part of the larger group.

We look forward to moving the Chapter forward in these two main areas in 2021, and look ahead to when we can be together again!