Volume 31 | Issue 3

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.

What a year! In continuing to improve well-organized bookcases and other real or virtual backdrops, we have clearly embraced the new normal. While the disappointment of missing real human contact associated with education is difficult to quantitate, there is certainly a silver lining to be appreciated. Developing and delivering didactic materials during a pandemic has required us to dig deep into the reserves of our creativity, and the results have been excellent to say the least.

On behalf of the Communications Committee, we invite you to take a look at the newly launched SOCCA Drip online. To provide a greater wealth of resources to members in a timelier fashion, SOCCA Drip will be regularly updated to feature both long-form content written by members and brief topical highlights from the popular media, peer-reviewed literature, relevant professional societies, and other sources that will be of interest to the membership. We will continue to aggregate the majority of these features into our quarterly Interchange newsletter.

This month we are featuring Dr. Jing Tao. Dr. Tao is an anesthesiologist and intensivist at Memorial Sloane Kettering Hospital in New York. She is originally from NYC, completed residency training at the University of Maryland, and then her critical care medicine fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. We asked Dr. Tao to reflect on her experience as a SOCCA member so far.

COVID-19 has caused immense stress on physicians. Anesthesiologists and critical care physicians have been at the forefront of pandemic response, whether caring for critically ill patients or facilitating surgical procedures amidst significant uncertainty. Health care providers are particularly vulnerable to mental health issues amidst risk of exposure, longer work hours, shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE), challenging resource allocation decisions, stress of caring for their loved ones, threatened financial and job security, and an overall decrease in social interactions.

The biting cold winter in Minnesota did not feel any different in January, 2020, but for the news wildly circulating over the internet, television, radio, and social media of a novel coronavirus spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which would later be termed SARS-CoV-2. Everywhere else, people continued their life with minimal worry. In the new millennium, other potential pandemic threats related to SARS (2003), H1N1 (2009), MERS (2012), and Ebola (2014-2016) were readily managed with routine infectious disease principles and did not disrupt our life to any significant extent.

Particularly challenging in the chronically hospitalized, the immunocompromised, and those with cystic fibrosis, P. aeruginosa has found a niche in intensive care units around the world. P. aeruginosa is a very common, encapsulated, gram-negative rod that has been recognized for its highly evolved antibiotic resistance.

Jeanine P. Wiener-Kronish, MD, Henry Isaiah Dorr Distinguished Professor of Research and Teaching in Anaesthetics and Anaesthesia; Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts was the 2020 SOCCA Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique crisis in healthcare across the world. Due to the shortage of staff to cover surge intensive care units in many hospitals, the Society of Critical Care Medicine, among other organizations, recommended a tiered approach to forming surge capacity teams for coverage of additional critical care beds. These models seek to extend the expertise and oversight of intensivists, and other critical care professionals, to a greater number of patients via a multidisciplinary team.