This is being written as COVID-19 unfolds in the United States, and I hope you are safe and secure. My submission is actually overdue owing to local involvement in disaster preparedness and response planning, and I know many of you are in similar positions within your institutions. This should serve to remind us, as well as our professional colleagues and administrative partners, of the broad skill sets we bring to the table. These skill sets not only include clinical care but the ability to build teams, make decisions, and effectively communicate.

This time of the year the SOCCA Education Committee turns its focus toward the final planning of the Annual Meeting in San Francisco. This year the meeting will comprise up to three days of content beginning with a new board review course on Thursday, May 14; followed by the dedicated SOCCA day on Friday, May 15; and finally aligned SOCCA-IARS content on Saturday, May 16.

With two months of 2020 already behind us, the Communication Committee is collaborating with the Board of Directors and SOCCA’s other committees to create a unified communication strategy moving forward. This is an exciting time for SOCCA: membership is on the rise, the inaugural SOCCA board review course is forthcoming in conjunction with the Annual Meeting, and a clinical trials group is beginning to coalesce.

Media attention concerning the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in December of 2019 has steadily increased over preceding weeks, and at the time of writing there is early evidence of community spread in the United States. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-2019) outbreak to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and significant efforts are underway to better understand the disease’s clinical features, transmissibility, and potential treatment options.

Worldwide, candidiasis remains the most the important and common fungal infection with crude and attributable mortality rates of 42% and 27%, respectively. There has been a recent deluge of drug-resistant Candida auris (C. auris) infections in intensive care units (ICUs) worldwide. In the United States alone, C. auris has led to hundreds of deaths in the past three years largely concentrated in Illinois, New York and New Jersey.

The evolution of critical care ultrasound in North America has been remarkable. Rapid technological advances have moved cardiac ultrasonography from the sole domain of cardiology and into the hands of the bedside intensivists. The increased availability of this disruptive technology, paired with an evolving appreciation of its applicability to the critically ill patient, have led to widespread adoption by intensivists across the nation.

A late-night code blue alarm ringing through a hospital’s hallways is not new to our ears. We as anesthesiologists and intensivists have been ‘first responders’ to these adverse events and also ‘first receivers’ of these patients in the ICU. This ‘4am’ patient deterioration phenomenon may be a simple lack of appropriate surveillance systems or maybe a more complex interplay of underlying patient physiology and concurrent disease insults.

Jarva Chow recently reviewed notable trials from 2019 at the Anesthesia Year in Review session during SCCM’s 49th Annual Congress in Orlando, Florida. Six particularly relevant trials are summarized in this article.

Read members-only job posts—including roles with the Department of Anesthesiology at The University of Vermont /University of Vermont Medical Center and St. Luke’s University Health Network—at SOCCA’s Job Board. If you would like to post a job, please email a short description and/or PDF flyer including location, contact information, and closing date to SOCCA Society Director, Vivian Abalama, IOM, CAE at vabalama@iars.org.

Interchange seeks to deliver timely, relevant, and high-quality content to SOCCA members. Contributions from members are not only welcome but essential to ensure that Interchange meets these goals. If you are interested in authoring content concerning clinical challenges, emerging research findings, member accomplishments, or anything of general interest to the membership, please reach out to vabalama@iars.org.