Oklahoma City is hosting the Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America (APPNA) Spring Meeting, which will have over 1,000 doctors attend. The conference includes a medical symposium with lectures, a springtime kite flying event, and an organ donation walk to raise awareness about transplants.
Residents may also participate in a street festival with live Pakistani cooking demonstrations near the Omni hotel.
News 9 was joined Sunday morning by Dr. Nakeem Tahirkheli, an interventional cardiologist at the Oklahoma Heart Hospital, and Dr. Fazal Ali, who practices Nephrology at Integris Health to discuss the upcoming event.
Q: Can you tell us about the Spring Meeting?
APPNA is a physician of Pakistani doctors. They have chapters all over the U.S.A. This year we are hosting a Spring Meeting in downtown Oklahoma. Dr. Nainter Hailey and I have a big host committee. We are organizing many activities during that event. One of those is a medical symposium where physicians will give lectures on cutting-edge research. And you will enjoy those activities, including Basant, which is a kite flight festival in Lahore, Pakistan. We’re bringing in Oklahoma, and you will see in Scissortail Park, a lot of colorful kites are flying all over the sky.
Q: What other kinds of activities will be available?
A: Well, one of the things we’re doing is an organ donation walk. So, you know, transplants are very important for a lot of people who are very sick. So folks all around the state that are participating in transplant, physicians and nurses and our patients are coming together on Saturday around 2 p.m. The mayor will be there and we’ll be walking to just commemorate them and highlight that. The other thing, I think that the community can get involved in, local Oklahoma City folks, is downtown, right next to the Omni Hotel, and in between the Convention Center and the Omni Hotel, is the McCornet Drive. So we will essentially close it off and then we will bring in folks that have Pakistani restaurants all across the country. And they’ll come in and they will have live cooking over there. So it’s taken quite a bit of effort, starting from the mayor to the fire marshal to environment and sewage and all that. But it’s a great fun event and the last time we did this was 2022 and we have thousands and thousands of people.
Q: How do you bring so many to our community, and what’s the event’s impact?
A: So, you know, physicians make a fair, decent amount of money. If we can bring them here to Oklahoma City, we provide a lot of activity for our businesses. But also, Oklahoma has a major shortage of physicians. So if we can bring these physicians from elsewhere and say, we have got a great state here and a great city here, come work with us, we can provide some necessary health care that we do need here…