Happy New Year and I hope you are keeping warm! I’d like to take this column to introduce some of the activities and tools that SOCCA members can look forward to as this (surprisingly) cold winter turns to Spring. You may first notice that this newsletter (formerly the Interchange) has a new format! Instead of that stodgy old pdf (that few people read), we have now moved into a platform accessible from your computer, handheld, or even Anesthesia workstation. This platform is more dynamic and flexible, allows better integration of online content, is more closely aligned with our website and Twitter page, and (hopefully) more fun to read.

“Part of this complete breakfast.” This is the closing line of nearly every breakfast food commercial since at least the mid-1980s. The final scene universally depicts two mainstays: the product, and a cup of orange juice. In popular culture, citrus fruits are crucial to balanced nutrition and provide essential vitamin C. Colloquially, this nutrient is well known to stave off scurvy; but, medically, it has far more powerful potential as a tool to combat the sequelae of infection.

Is Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) the new and improved answer to decreasing sepsis-related mortality? It’s unclear. Up until this point, ascorbic acid has been studied in small cohorts of mostly cancer or burn patients. Studies in these populations have had variable results, some showing no difference in outcomes and others displaying impressive benefits.

Dr. Todd Dorman MD, FCCM is the Senior Associate Dean for Education Coordination, the Associate Dean of Continuing Medical Education, the Vice-Chair for Critical Care and a Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is a past president of the Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologist and the Society of Critical Care Medicine and was the 2017 SOCCA Lifetime Achievement Award Winner.

I wanted to provide an update on the ACCM fellowship match. The ACCM fellowship application process has been managed by SF Match for four match cycles now, and we are in the midst of our fifth. So far it has largely been viewed as successful, and most programs report seeing a larger number of applications since the match was instituted. At the time utilizing a match was agreed upon, many programs worried that they would lose applicants to the vagaries of the match who otherwise they would have been certain to recruit.

Towards the end of last year, a consortium of academic anesthesiology organizations launched an initiative to help establish a clinical trials network in the U.S., which would focus on perioperative medicine, critical care, pain management, and peri- and post-partum care.

Welcome to the SOCCA 2018 Annual Meeting and Critical Care Update, a meeting I am confident you will find rewarding with many valuable takeaways and networking opportunities. The members of the SOCCA Committee on Education, Drs. Adam S. Evans, Sheila Pai Cole, and Peter Von Homeyer, have developed a cutting-edge education program, addressing the latest advances in critical care and investigating the most pressing issues in anesthesiology.

The attendees of the SOCCA Annual Meeting will have the opportunity to take advantage of a special Aligned Meeting and SOCCA Focus on Critical Care Day on Saturday, April 28, complimentary as part of their registration fee. Thought leaders in anesthesiology will present a wide selection of robust education sessions, highlighting pioneering topics in anesthesia and celebrating advances in education, science, research and the art of anesthesiology.

Have you visited SOCCA’s Job Board recently? Recent listings include positions with Mercy Medical Group of Sacramento, CA; Southern Arizona VA Health Care System of Tucson, AZ; and Oregon Health & Science University of Portland, OR.

If you have an interesting case report, an idea for a pro-con discussion, a review idea, or an opinion on a recently published article, please submit your proposal/article to Vivian Abalama, CAE, at vabalama@iars.org on or before Friday, April 20, 2018. If your article is chosen for the newsletter, we will contact you for editing and formatting.