The Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists

Chronic pain syndromes are a persistent problem in the United States, with conservative estimates suggesting a cost $560 to $635 billion dollars annually. Chronic pain following intensive care unit (ICU) survival is difficult to quantify, as patient populations vary across hospital centers and within different ICU settings; however, current evidence demonstrates that anywhere from 12-60% of patients remain affected by chronic pain at 6-months to a year following ICU admission, which contributes to a significant portion of diagnoses nationally.

Bedside percutaneous tracheostomy is a common, well-tolerated bedside procedure for critically-ill patients with prolonged respiratory failure. In this report, we present an uncommon and potentially dangerous complication of this procedure.

Despite surgical patients presenting to the operating room (OR) sicker than ever before, the intraoperative period has, paradoxically, become far safer. Current estimates of intraoperative mortality are less than 1 in 100,000 patients. However, 30-day postoperative mortality is still significant at 1-2%, a fact that suggests that if 30-day postop mortality were considered a disease, it would be the third leading cause of death in the United States.

The medical field has finally begun to recognize the impact of job satisfaction and burnout. While much attention has been paid to how changes in the work environment affect this state of affairs, less thought has been given to how variables outside the hospital or clinic could impact physician well-being. This is particularly relevant to critical care medicine: in Medscape’s 2018 Physician Lifestyle Report, which polled over 15,000 physicians across 29 specialties, a whopping 48% of critical care physicians reported feeling burned out.

The European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM) recently published a consensus statement and clinical recommendations regarding the fluid management of neuro-intensive care patients (NIC), including comatose (GCS < 9) patients with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), high-grade aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), severe arterial ischemic stroke (AIS) or intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH).

The SOCCA Membership Committee would like to welcome all of our current members, as well as, new Critical Care Anesthesiology faculty and fellows to the 2019 academic year! Overall, our current membership remains strong. Maintaining a strong and engaged membership is important to the long-term health of SOCCA. We’ve been able to maintain this strong membership level because of you!

Jeff Vender, MD, MCCM, MBA is the Emeritus, Harris Family Foundation Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, Illinois and a Clinical Professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School Of Medicine. Dr. Vender was the recipient of the SOCCA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.

Nicholas Sadovnikoff, MD, FCCM, will receive the Shubin-Weil Master Clinician/Teacher: Excellence in Bedside Teaching Award at the Society of Critical Care Medicine’s (SCCM) 48th Critical Care Congress during the American College of Critical Care Medicine Convocation/SCCM Awards Presentation held on Monday, February 18, 2019.

Have you visited SOCCA’s Job Board recently? Recent listings include positions with University of Michigan School of Medicine and Anesthesia Associates of Morristown, New Jersey.

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 review the submission guidelines and submit your proposal/article to Vivian Abalama, CAE, IOM at vabalama@iars.org on or before December 3, 2018. If your article is chosen for the newsletter, we will contact you for editing and formatting.