The period between Thanksgiving (some would even say Halloween) and New Year’s Day feels like a sprint to the end, a mad rush of preordained traditions that fills us with a sense of the tried and true, the old leading to the new, the past looking towards the future. So, this is a good time for a look back at 2021, the second and (hopefully) final act of our very own modern Greek tragedy, a year where nearly 400,000 fellow citizens died as a consequence of a disease we didn’t even know existed a little over 2 years ago.

Despite another year of pandemic-related challenges in the clinical practice of intensive care medicine, the SOCCA Research Committee continues with enthusiasm as we move towards the end of 2021. Our three subcommittees (Data, Research Collaboration, Scientific Writing) have been extremely productive.

As educators, we strive for a mindset of innovation in both how and what we teach in Critical Care Medicine. The intensivists of tomorrow are expected to be clinically excellent, adept in responding to changes in the healthcare environment and also competent in the administrative arena.

With the holiday season upon us, in the US and globally, ICUs (Intensive Care Units) are still struggling with the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in our history, hospital systems are forced to scramble to allocate scarce resources such as nursing, respiratory therapists, ICU beds, oxygenation, and drug treatments that lack adequate amount of literature support.

Dr. Pinxia Chen currently practices at Saint Luke’s University Health System in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and has been with her group for five years. Dr. Chen is originally from the South Jersey/Philadelphia area and started her career with an anesthesiology residency at Penn State Medical Center in Hershey and a fellowship in critical care at the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Chen stated that she then looked for academic jobs with a strong anesthesiology presence in the ICU. However, the academic jobs available in her preferred geographic location left something to be desired and her current position in private practice did allow for strong clinical involvement by anesthesiologists in the critical care setting. When Dr. Chen started there were only two people in the group with formal critical care training. That number has grown considerably since that time. 

Peter Safar, the creator of the first intensive care unit (ICU) in the United States, father of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, pioneer of the modern ambulance design, and three-time nominee for the Nobel Prize, repeatedly delivered a very simple message: physician-scientists are in danger of extinction.1