President’s Corner

Colleagues, as you all know, our road trip to Hawaii was canceled due to COVID, again. However, our Education Committee and the IARS rallied and quickly changed gears to a 100% virtual annual meeting. Although we all missed seeing each other in person, the meeting was incredibly successful and well attended. At the SOCCA annual meeting on Friday, we had four very lively educational sessions and aligned sessions with the IARS, AUA, and SOCCA. We then ended the day with our young investigator award presentations. On Saturday, the next day was the IARS | AUA | SOCCA aligned meeting day. We sponsored a review course lecture and a panel on evidence-based emergency airway management, which generated many comments and discussions.

If you missed the meeting, you can still register to watch the session recordings by visiting our SOCCA website. Next year's annual meeting will be in Denver, Colorado, on April 14, 2023. The education committee is already planning for the conference itself, and I encourage everyone to submit panels and ideas for next year's meeting.

This year SOCCA has added several new working groups, including the Early Career Workgroup, the Medical Student, Resident, and Fellows Workgroup, the Physicians and Practice Workgroup, the Women in Critical Care Workgroup, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Workgroup. Many of these workgroups are already planning virtual meetings for the rest of this year and webinars. If you are interested in joining any of these workgroups, please attend their open meetings and webinars and let them know. Our Society is highly interested in finding out what topics have value to our members and what things our members would like us to do. This is an excellent opportunity to help lead our Society.

SOCCA will also start a new clinical practice committee, which will oversee additional new workgroups, councils, and task forces. These will include a transplant critical-care working group, a mechanical circulatory support working group, a Neurocritical care workgroup, and a service chiefs advisory council. These groups will be tasked to develop their own content goals and objectives and form more collaborations with other societies such as the Society for the Advancement of Transplant Anesthesia, Society for Neuroscience in Anesthesiology and Critical Care, etc. In the next couple of months, the Board of Directors will determine which of these will be started in 2022-23 and which ones will be started in 2023-24. More information on these new groups will be announced soon, including details on how to get involved in these new SOCCA activities.

If you have any other ideas or suggestions on improving the value of SOCCA to our current and future members, please do not hesitate to let me, the Board of Directors, or the Committee Chairs know.

I hope you all have a safe, healthy, and happy summer, and I look forward to seeing you on a Zoom call or in-person soon.

Author

Michael H. Wall, MD, FCCM

President, Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists

University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minnesota