This Year’s Accomplishments of the American Limb Preservation Society

Dear colleague,

Looking back at the past year I could not be prouder of what the American Limb Preservation Society (ALPS) has accomplished—not only peri pandemically, but in our inaugural year. ALPS was founded during DFCon in October 2020, and since then our society has grown and evolved from a small group of people passionate about limb preservation, to a member based nonprofit, 501c3 of “sole-brothers” and “sole-sisters”. If you are not already a member, we would love to welcome you in our society.

ALPS’ mission is to eliminate all preventable amputations over the next generation. We believe in order to do this, we must create pathways and infrastructure for multidisciplinary limb preservation teams with diverse expertise to work together and collaborate, to ensure the best patient outcomes. One of the ways we will accomplish this is through our online “matchmaking” platform that we are currently developing and will launch in early 2022. We would like to see ALPS become a mix between a dating-app and a marriage counselor that will connect health professionals from different fields for better patient outcomes.

In October, we were pleased to host and organize the 21st annual DFCon in San Francisco. In spite of the international travel restrictions to the US, we were still able to gather experts from around the world for a successful and insightful conference that was held in San Francisco and virtually. At the conference, we awarded the first recipient of “ALPS’ Travelling Fellowship”, an initiative we will continue to fund annually. We are also creating an ALPS Limb Preservation ambassador program for empowering young clinicians in the field of limb preservation. Getting them involved as ambassadors puts them in a position to succeed in their region, nationally and worldwide.

This year we also launched ALPS’ website and developed a professional resource center, with guidelines, meta-analyses, and consensus recommendations on topics from vascular assessment and limb/wound staging to medical management and postoperative care and surveillance. We are also developing and planning to launch a similar resource page in 2022 for patients and their caregivers. In addition to this we are building an online video library for patients and health care providers.

To accelerate the development of ALPS, we have brought Georgia Krehbiel on board as CEO. Georgia is experienced in developing and running associations and we are pleased to have her on the team. Together we will get closer to our ultimate goal of eliminating preventable amputations.

As you can see, so much has happened since we all came together to form this organization. All of this amazing work can’t continue without your support. Please consider making your 2021 charitable contribution to ALPS and help us continue the work in 2022. Our collective effort is and will continue to make a difference.

Best regards on behalf of ALPS’ Executive Board,

David G. Armstrong DPM, MD, PhD and Founding President of ALPS

And

Georgia Krehbiel, Chief Executive Officer of ALPS