On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak that originated in China a worldwide pandemic.The effect of this has been a worldwide crisis of many dimensions beyond contagion, sickness, and death. It has stalled the world’s economy and put business and medical practices on standstill overnight and created the largest unemployment rate in decades. Most of The Aesthetic Society members are in the private practice of aesthetic plastic surgery either as sole practitioners or as small groups. They are extremely vulnerable to a disruption where elective surgery and nonsurgical procedures are curtailed. Offices are shuttered, and staff cannot work. Since March 11, 2020, over a million individuals would be infected, almost 100,000 worldwide (as of today) would die, and the world’s economy as we know it ceased to exist.

At that point, we collectively thought that there was a great opportunity for The Aesthetic Society to connect with its members as we all were struggling with how to proceed. We decided to offer a practice management webinar series to help members deal with the effect of the pandemic on their patients, practices, their lives, and the economy. For the last 25 years at The Aesthetic Society annual meetings, we have offered a comprehensive practice management instructional course. The curriculum has evolved over the years to include topics of disruption, personnel, team building, patient communication, service recovery, and social media. Given the pandemic as a “sum of all fears” scenario for disaster, we strategized on a webinar curriculum to address important common issues that affect all of us. Kudos to The Aesthetic Society’s leadership and its Education Commission for the green light to start the webinar series. Thanks are also in order to Sientra for sponsoring the webinar series and for technical assistance in using the Zoom online webinar platform (https://zoom.com; Zoom Video Communications, Inc., San Jose, CA). For those who were not able to see the Webinar live, the content has been archived and preserved and is accessible on the www.surgery.org/private/webinars site and also available on RADAR. This webinar was the first of its kind and set the standard for member service from a major plastic surgery society. The Aesthetic Society led the way in terms of a quickly developed webinar series in response to the coronavirus disaster, setting a standard for addressing the concerns of plastic surgeons and creating clarity out of general panic.

Disasters and disruptions come in all sizes and types, yet this one was different in terms of its incredible spectrum of contagion, infection requiring hospital care, death, home confinement, and standstill of the world’s business economy. With the economic impact of no work, it becomes a liquidity crisis for businesses that can quickly progress to insolvency. We collectively envisioned and presented a different playbook for recovery than in earlier economic disruptions caused by 9/11 or banking in 2008.

First, we saw this disaster as unfolding daily right in front of us, affecting the health of our patients. Our practices were closed, we could not perform elective aesthetic surgery or cosmetic medicine, and cash flow has stopped. We felt a responsibility for our staff, who need to be paid along with our creditors and landlord.2,3 An opportunity existed, to connect with our members in the United States and internationally to overcome feelings of doom and to harness a connected community to address these issues. Our first webinar was developed along the line of one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats during the Great Depression where a thoughtful conversation was developed that gave individuals the opportunity to believe in themselves and have a call to action. Times have changed from listening to the President over a depression-era vacuum tube radio to a sophisticated video webinar program; however, the message of hope, leadership, resolve, and recovery still remain key elements.

The first webinar ran over 2 hours and addressed key topics of webinar listed in Table 1. It has more registrants than could be accommodated and hundreds of submitted questions. Our webinar faculty gave individual expert perspectives and ideas that offered the attendees ways to address the disruption and start planning for recovery. Some of the salient points for practice managers are listed in Table 2.

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doi.org/10.1093/asjof/ojaa017