Need answers to pressing questions in clinical practice, career advancement, research, work-life balance, or academic journey? Explore the WICC’s peer mentorship model – the consultancy – which may help in answering these queries. Starting on March 28, WICC will present a quarterly one-hour Fireside Consultancy style hour.

The WICC Member Spotlight highlights our members’ day-to-day work lives. How do our members “do it all”? Balance their busy work life with their interests outside of work. These profiles highlight that although practicing as an Anesthesiology Critical Care attending may seem daunting as a trainee, it is a challenging yet fulfilling specialty.

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.

SOCCA WICC ended the year with a Fireside chat featuring three Intensivists in different phases of their career to share their unique journeys in academia, professional life, and career challenges. Drs. Sheela Pai Cole, Brigid Flynn, and Emily Vail joined Drs. Tabaie and Siddiqui to host the fourth and final Fireside Chat for WICC in November. Dr. Tabaie moderated the panel and asked varied questions of the speakers about mentorship, balancing academic focus and clinical demands, strategies for saying ‘no’ to opportunities when stretched, and pulling back and re-engaging with an academic career due to family obligations. The panelists spoke with candor and authenticity and shared wise pearls of experiential learning and advice on resilience. The chat provided a welcome semi-formal atmosphere for the audience to hear from successful academic intensivists and have them share workplace experiences, offering a space for support and for practicing methods to achieve career advancement.

Dr. Teresa Mulaikal, MD, FASE, is a cardiothoracic and critical care anesthesiologist, practicing at Columbia University in New York. Tess Russell, MD, Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, is a Texas transplant to New York City.

I recently had several conversations with rising women medical students and residents wanting to know more about anesthesiology and critical care medicine as a career. Typically, in these situations, I think many of us feel compelled to give “the pitch” for why our lives are so great. And yes, recruitment into our subspecialty, particularly for women, is severely needed.

How do you balance starting a career with having enough time for family or obligations outside work? Does having young children make it difficult to launch your career, or can you really do it all?

A diverse workforce has the potential to mitigate healthcare disparities, and improve patient satisfaction. ¹ Diverse leadership offers key benefits as described by 14 members of Forbes Coaches Council in a recent publication. ²  

In the last 50 years, the number of women graduating as physicians has increased; these trends have been noted in the United States, Europe, and as well as low-middle-income countries¹. Emerging demographic trends in Critical Care Fellow recruitment from 2004-2017 highlighted the significant increase in female fellows from 29.5% in 2004 to 38.3% in 2014, (p < 0.001)². Although the number of women graduating as physicians is increasing, those taking up critical care medicine and rising within organizations as leaders are painfully low.

One Year (and Counting!) of Action and Engagement

With the Women in Critical Care (WICC) section’s one-year anniversary, we presented several initiatives accomplished in the past year at the SOCCA 2023 annual business meeting. We have shared several Interchange articles, Fireside chats, and two webinars that have been well received—one on Wellness and a recent webinar on strategies to enhance women applicants in CCM.

Dr. Jessica Cassavaugh is a T32 Research fellow and Clinical Instructor in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care, and Pain Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She completed her anesthesiology residency and critical care fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Her current research focuses on estrogen-dependent regulation of inflammatory and hypoxic signaling, especially as it relates to cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

February 3rd marks Elizabeth Blackwell’s birthday. Dr. Blackwell (3 February 1821 – 31 May 1910) was a British physician, notable as the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, and the first woman on the Medical Register of the UK. In addition to being an academic infectious disease specialist, she was an advocate for social justice and equity for women. She founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857 along with her sister Emily, and she played a significant role in the American Civil War by organizing nurses and educating women and girls. It is important when looking at history to include the contributions of Black women physicians who have equally contributed in the struggle to achieve the successes of today. In the book ‘Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century’, Jasmine Brown (Beacon Press, January 24, 2023) shares the incredible stories of nine pioneering Black women physicians beginning in 1860, when a Black woman first entered medical school. The stories of Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, Dr. Edith Jones, and Dr. Joycelyn Elders inspire and serve as a source of motivation to many young physicians on this Women Physician’s Day, when we celebrate the accomplishments of women doctors before us, and their struggles. We have come a long way since the days of these pioneering women physicians. However, much work remains to be done, and WICC and SOCCA hope to play an essential role in closing this gap.

We hope you are well and have seen the new uploads on our Women in Critical Care website (SOCCA) and our column in the SOCCA Interchange. We are adding more content and intend to bring new Webinars, Fireside Chats, and—hopefully—some more creative content designed for the busy woman in CCM.

Disclaimer: This is a work product of Women in Critical Care and does not represent the views of the Society of Critical Care Anesthesiologists

Background: Despite the increasing percentage of female intensivists and their multifaceted involvement in healthcare over the last decades, to date, their representation in physician workforce, academic positions and leadership roles in critical care remains disproportionately low.

As I sit here writing a piece about work-life balance for women critical care physicians, I feel compelled to paint the picture of my current situation: in-house on call at 9pm on a Friday night, an AirPod in one ear teleconferencing my children to say goodnight, strapped into a portable breast pump, eating the fastest thing I could get from the hospital cafeteria (which is invariably fried), all while typing away at this piece in the physician work room. I am awash in irony. Is this the image of the prototypical woman intensivist? Not at all. Am I currently burned out? Actually, I don’t think so. Have I been burned out at some point during my medical career thus far? Definitely. How do I refine my career plan to achieve work-life balance and sustainability for a satisfying and productive professional career? Unclear, check back later.

Our realities changed during the pandemic and many people asked a very important question, possibly for the first time in their lives: what brings me joy and fulfilment? Is my choice of career a good fit for me? Outside of medicine, it is this feeling of being unfulfilled that has led to what is being dubbed ‘The Great Resignation’. Amongst physicians, the lack of connectedness and satisfaction with one’s specialty has led to high rates of burnout. Pre-pandemic literature on burnout suggested that engaged physicians tend to have less burnout. Engagement outside of clinical work can be driven by continued learning, faculty development and mentorship, having a social network and many more things. For me, engagement included interacting with my trainees, seeking ways to improve my clinical practice and finding mentorship from other physicians in my area of interest. This is where the role of belonging to a professional organization became very important.

A 2018 viewpoint published in JAMA Internal Medicine highlighted four archetypes of “mentorship”: the traditional mentor, the coach, the sponsor and the connector.¹ The authors explain, “To put it simply, the mentor guides, the coach improves, the sponsor nominates, and the connector empowers, but always the mentee benefits.” As I read this article, I was struck by how rare it is for one person to be able to fulfill all these needs, and how I was lucky enough to have a mentor, Dr. Hannah Wunsch, who can and does embody all four roles.

Where We Are

Over the past decade, the need to promote gender diversity in medicine has been embraced by several medical societies. In the USA in 2017, 33% of critical care trainees and 26% of ICU physicians were women. There are many reasons for this disparity and work is being done to understand these reasons to some extent. It was noted in literature that an explicit focus on “eliminating gender inequity will help to gradually change societal views of the roles played by women and men critical care physicians so that it will become the norm for women and men to be both critical care physicians and leaders in critical care.”

Meeting Updates

Women in Critical Care’s Mission Statement and Vision:

Mission: To provide a community of mentorship, sponsorship and support that promotes the recruitment, development, advancement, and well-being of women in Critical Care Anesthesiology.

Vision: To foster women leaders in Critical Care Anesthesiology.

How long have you been a SOCCA Member?
Since 2010

What is your favorite part of SOCCA?
I like that it highlights critical care anesthesiologists and creates a community for us to engage in.

We had our first ‘kick off’ meeting for Women in Critical Care. We had 59 pre-registrants and 17 participants for the first zoom meeting on February 23. Our objective was to introduce the mission as well as to decide a structure and goals for the year. We discussed a website launch as well as a first, official meeting on March 17 at the 2022 SOCCA Virtual Annual Meeting where we will have an invited guest speaker: Dr. Deborah Cook (a truly inspiring woman intensivist).