Lunch, learn and interact during Periop Leader Week’s lunchtime roundtable discussions

Many of you have been to many, many conferences over the years. And while they’re usually great experiences, often by Day 2 or 3 you begin to suffer from the dreaded “death by PowerPoint”—session after session after session of one or two people presenting on a topic as you sit silently in various rooms for hours at a time, taking it all in.

Don’t get us wrong: Periop Leader Week offers plenty of these types of presenter-led sessions, and there’s absolutely nothing inherently wrong with them. In fact, they’re great—and our lineup of solo and duo presenters is phenomenal this year. But Periop Leader Week places just as much emphasis on connection and community as it does on presenter-led classroom-style education.

Perhaps the purest distillation of that focus on connection and community is this week’s collection of peer-to-peer roundtable discussions. In these sessions, a perioperative leader will engage their assembled peers (like you) to work through problems, discuss challenges, and share insights on a particular topic. It’s a great way for members of our perioperative leadership community to learn from each other, make new contacts and connections, and gain fresh ideas and approaches you can take home and possibly implement in your own perioperative environment.

Periop Leader Week 2026 offers a wide range of these open roundtable sessions. For example, there are our five lunchtime roundtables from 12:30 to 1:15 pm on Tuesday, October 6. Attending community members can grab food and drinks and sit down in our Periop Networking & Innovation Hall’s dining area to lunch, learn, contribute and connect with like-minded peers on any of five focused discussions—one for each of our five educational tracks.

Here’s the lineup of lunchtime roundtable discussions that perioperative leaders can join on Tuesday:

• Data, Technology, and Analytics. Led by our Operational Efficiency & Technology program committee co-chairs Kate Ulrich, MS, BSN, RN, NEA-BC, and Becky Rayburn, RN, MS, CAPA, ABLS
• Patient Safety. Led by perioperative safety expert Amanda Heitman, BSN, RN, CNOR
• The Role of the Perioperative Business Manager. Join our Business Management track co-chairs Malcolm Ladines, MS, MLS, BSN, RN, CSSBB, CQIA, and Doug Reynolds, MBA, to talk shop and compare notes with your fellow perioperative business leaders about the nature of your role in your organization
• Dealing with dissatisfied and disgruntled patients at the ASC. Join our ASC & Outpatient track co-chair Bev Kirchner, MSN, RN, CNOR, CNAMB, to talk about patient complaints and how you handle them.
• Innovations in perioperative nurse residency programs. Join Sharon Udy-Janczuk, EdD, MSN, RN, CNOR-PEDS, CPN, NE-BC, to discuss this perennial workforce development topic.

Tomorrow, we’ll tell you about additional peer-to-peer roundtable sessions that will take place in our breakout rooms on Tuesday and Wednesday!