It is an exhilarating time for SOCCA! I hope to see as many of you as possible at the 2024 annual meeting presented by IARS and SOCCA in Seattle on May 17-19. This is an excellent opportunity for SOCCA because we have more critical care educational content in this new format than we have ever had in any of our annual meetings.

I hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday, it is one of my favorites. Thanksgiving comes without all the heavy expectations of other holidays, promising simply a good meal with the important people in your life. The premise is also a good one – reflection on what we can be thankful for. What makes me thankful?

August was Charlie Parker Month, the month of the great musician’s birth. I am, of course, a jazz fan, but Mr. Parker is also on my mind for his outstanding talent. He was among the foremost innovators in the most improvisational of music genres. This capability made him flexible, inspiring, and able to direct groups in productive and creative ways. Capabilities are the necessary support for achievement. Today, SOCCA is a nimble organization that is enhancing its capabilities.

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. 

Join us for the 2024 Annual Meeting, presented by IARS and SOCCA in Seattle, May 17-19. The education committee has created an outstanding program with a critical-care track running concurrently throughout the meeting. The format and content of the meeting look extraordinary, with more critical-care content than we have ever had before. There will be three SOCCA-sponsored breakfasts, and all committees and subcommittees will have the opportunity to meet in person throughout the meeting. In addition, a dedicated SOCCA session will run on Sunday afternoon until about 5PM, including additional educational panels, the SOCCA awards presentations, and the SOCCA business meeting. I hope everyone stays for the entire duration of this exciting meeting.

The goal of SOCCA is to offer numerous areas and opportunities for our members to engage and grow our Society, and our members have been very busy!

Colleagues,

We had a fantastic SOCCA and IARS meeting in Denver. It was great seeing so many friends and colleagues and watching our packed conference room during the meeting. Even more impressive was the membership involvement with our new committees, task forces, and workgroups. The goal of SOCCA is to continue to offer numerous areas and opportunities for our members to engage and grow our society.

Colleagues,

Seeing so many SOCCA members in person at the SCCM meeting in San Francisco last month was great. SOCCA members were well-represented on many SCCM panels, workshops, roundtables, and other educational events. The SCCM anesthesia section reception was exceptionally well attended and could have easily been a SOCCA business meeting! We look forward to seeing everyone in person at the annual meeting in Denver in April. 

Colleagues,

I hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving and have a happy and healthy holiday season (so far), avoiding COVID, RSV, adenovirus, and Influenza. Good Grief.  

The education committee has planned an extraordinary annual meeting which will take place in Denver, Colorado on April 14, 2023. On Saturday April 15th, there is an impressive lineup of educational events during the IARS, AUA, and SOCCA-aligned meeting day. Most importantly, I hope you plan to attend the SOCCA Women in Critical Care and SOCCA Early Career group meet-up and networking events between 7:00-9:00 PM on Thursday, April 13. There is also a reception on Friday, April 14, from 7:30-9:30 PM. It will be great to see everyone in person again.

Colleagues, next year’s annual meeting will be in Denver, Colorado, on April 14, 2023. We have received many excellent submissions for next year’s annual meeting, and now the education committee has the difficult task of putting together the program. Some panels not selected for the annual meeting will be shifted to SOCCA webinars in 2023. More to follow.

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.

By the time you read this newsletter, you will have been informed that our annual meeting—in conjunction with the IARS’—for this coming March has been transitioned from in-person to virtual. This will mark the third consecutive year that we are not meeting in person and our second full virtual meeting. It’s a long time!

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.

Welcome to the Fall edition of Interchange! First and foremost, on behalf of the Society, I would like to congratulate all those young colleagues that have selected Anesthesia/Critical Care as their subspecialty. This issue is dedicated to you, our newest members.

The other day I was listening to one of my favorite podcasters (not in the medical field) about how she was forcing herself to wear regular clothes for five days in a row, as during the pandemic she had been wearing sweatpants for over 400 days and she had reached a point where she wanted to feel normal again.

Twenty years ago, I was in the middle of my critical care fellowship year when we admitted a patient that was “found down.” The patient was comatose, and we really did not have a lot of information or leads to guide our therapy. The patient had been admitted to the surgical ICU on the presumption that he was a trauma patient, but after the initial work up found no injuries, we were left with a long list of possible diagnosis and extensive detective work in front of us.

The holiday spirit is here! There are ornaments and festive music everywhere, Thanksgiving is still fresh in our memories, and the winter chill heralds the arrival of major religious holidays as well as the New Year. Yet, this year obviously feels different. For almost 12 months we have endured a pandemic that has transformed every aspect of our lives and will leave profound marks in the way we conduct ourselves for the foreseeable future.

A few months ago – what seems like a century – I daydreamed about all the good news that would come from our Annual Meeting in San Francisco. I was confident I’d be writing about how the meeting was a phenomenal success and how well SOCCA was positioned for the future.

This is being written as COVID-19 unfolds in the United States, and I hope you are safe and secure. My submission is actually overdue owing to local involvement in disaster preparedness and response planning, and I know many of you are in similar positions within your institutions. This should serve to remind us, as well as our professional colleagues and administrative partners, of the broad skill sets we bring to the table. These skill sets not only include clinical care but the ability to build teams, make decisions, and effectively communicate.

It is my hope that this issue of the Interchange finds you well. 2020 promises to be a year in which SOCCA will continue to evolve and advance the profession of anesthesiologist intensivists.

I hope that you are having a great summer. The contributions from many SOCCA volunteers are helping develop exciting projects with deliverables I believe the membership as a whole will find engaging and valuable. In this issue of the Interchange, I would like to highlight some the current efforts by the Education and Research Committees since they met in May in Montreal.

This contribution to the Interchange is being written before our annual meeting in Montreal. Montreal promises to be an exciting time where SOCCA members will be presented with numerous educational and networking opportunities. This gathering will also see various SOCCA committees meeting to determine goals that will further our mission of supporting and developing anesthesiologists who care for critically ill patients.

The New Year promises to be an exciting and productive time for SOCCA. The SOCCA Board of Directors held a strategic planning retreat in September 2018 to discuss the future of the organizations and review the information from the SOCCA membership survey. Thank you for your support and participation in the membership survey. We gained valuable insight and knowledge that helped shape our strategic plan conversation.

In an environment where we are frequently asked to provide survey responses, our recent SOCCA survey was an outlier. In the positive sense. 161 of you provided feedback that will help shape the future of SOCCA. While 53% of you were satisfied with SOCCA, we clearly have areas in which we can improve. General themes included the need for ongoing educational content delivered in various forms (e.g., on line content for just in time use) as well as professional development resources. It is also clear that there is considerable desire by members to become more involved in SOCCA activities.

Hopefully this edition of SOCCA Interchange you well and enjoying summer. There has been considerable discussion and deliberation by the leadership of SOCCA that will be of interest.

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.