It was great to see so many of you at the 2024 Annual Meeting, presented by IARS and SOCCA, in my old hometown of Seattle.  We presented what has to be the most extensive lineup of critical care content ever at a SOCCA meeting.  Many thanks to Allison Dalton and Kunal Karamchandani for an excellent group of topics and speakers.  Although the “feel” of the meeting is a little different, I hope you would agree the spirit is very much alive. 

I am excited to announce the long-anticipated expansion of our social media presence. In addition to our existing presence on Twitter, we are now on LinkedIn and Facebook. This expansion marks a significant step forward in our efforts to engage with you across multiple platforms.

This year’s meeting was a bit different from previous years, with the addition of a three-day critical care tract of panels, a SOCCA co-sponsored panel in the non-critical care tract, and an ultrasound workshop presented by our SOCCA members.

SOCCA membership continues to grow, so it is an exciting time to be on the membership committee! The committee met at the annual meeting in Seattle in May and had extensive discussions about how best to continue to serve our members.

The Clinical Practice Ad Hoc Committee (CPC) of the Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists (SOCCA) was created to foster collaboration across subspecialties and enhance engagement among SOCCA members. Established as an ad-hoc committee, the CPC aims to integrate various subspecialties into joint projects with SOCCA, thereby broadening the scope of expertise and enriching the collective knowledge within the society.

In keeping with our mission of offering mentorship and an opportunity to build a community, WICC presented a new format on March 28th, the Fireside Consultancy. This Fireside Consultancy was led by Dr. Hua, Co-Chair of WICC where 4 WICC participants presented focused issues that they were facing.

Coaching and mentoring are valuable tools in a physician’s professional development. They serve similar goals but have unique roles and boundaries. A mentor tells you how, but a coach asks you why. 

Introduction: Neuro-critical care constitutes a demanding, high-alert setting that requires expeditious decision-making by critical care teams in response to patient health status. The resource-intensive nature of neuro-critical care settings results in a substantial financial burden. As of 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported an annual national healthcare spending cost of $40.6 […]

In 2022, the medical community was introduced to the capabilities of ChatGPT – a popular large language model (LLM) that performed exceptionally well in medical problem solving, scoring above 85% on both USMLE Step 1 and Step 2. ChatGPT is a chatbot composed of an advanced language model from the family of Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models designed by OpenAI (San Francisco, California) in 2018.

The first public demonstration of an ether anesthetic in 1846 marked a turning point in our ability to provide safe and effective medical care. It birthed the specialty of anesthesiology as we know it today.