from the editor
Celebrating Achievements and Looking Forward
By Luis M. Zabala, MD
Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine
UT Southwestern Medical Center
Children’s Medical Center, Dallas
Welcome to the Summer 2016 edition of the CCAS Newsletter. It was once said “…without continual growth, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”* In that sense, the collective interest in our specialty and the hard work of our Board of Directors and meeting organizers has translated into substantial growth and tremendous achievements.
For those of us who had the opportunity to attend the 2016 CCAS Annual Meeting at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, we had the privilege of experiencing first hand the results of a full year of hard work from Dr. Mark Twite and the organizational committee. The morning scientific lectures and all three anesthesia practice update sessions served to stimulate our minds, elaborating on topics related to high altitude, neuroprotection, perioperative coagulation and the collaborative learning model as a mechanism to disseminate best practices. This was followed by magnificent lectures by Gregory Latham and Max Mitchell on anesthetic and surgical management of transposition of the great arteries.
The afternoon session was carefully crafted to underscore the growing population of adult congenital heart disease (ACHD), implications to our practice and a final commentary from Carrie Rydin, sharing her journey as an ACHD patient, a truly exceptional and touching 20 minutes. This year was also the first time workshops were made available to our attendees. These changes in the meeting’s format proved to be a huge success. Workshops were incredibly interactive and moderated by an outstanding list of experts in each field. This format will likely be repeated and possibly expanded for our next meeting in Austin, TX in 2017.
Our colleagues, Viviane Nasr from Boston Children’s Hospital, and our experienced meeting reviewer, Faith Ross, from Seattle Children’s Hospital, have done a great job summarizing our meeting and making the content available to all our colleagues who unable to attend.
The featured articles inside this edition of the Newsletter were selected to focus on new approaches to perioperative patient evaluation strategies. First, Dr. Rahul Baijal, from Texas Children’s Hospital, presents the current state of the literature on risk stratification for patients with congenital heart disease undergoing non-cardiac surgery. He highlights high-risk variables associated with adverse events derived from large anesthesia and surgical database studies. He also calls for the need of a scoring system to objectively define the risk for this population. This article is accompanied by an expert commentary by Dr. David Faraoni from Boston Children’s Hospital.
The second article is a well-written piece by Dr. Denise Joffe, from Seattle Children’s Hospital, on Point of Care Ultrasound in the Perioperative period. This article highlights the importance of a more in-depth evaluation in the clinical setting, and the integration of technology into our diagnostic armamentarium when complex situations arise. The use of ultrasound for central and peripheral access is well established in our patient population, now the direction is steering towards POC cardiac and lung ultrasonography to guide patient care. This article is accompanied by an expert commentary on bedside ultrasound use by Dr. Adam Adler from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
As stated above, we have witnessed tremendous growth in our Society in the past several years. With that growth comes great responsibility and the need for improvement, achievement and success. Messages like those received recently stating, “ that was a wonderful CCAS meeting” and “the landscape of the CCAS is changing and it has a great vibe” are a testament to our hard work and very encouraging to hear, and for that, we thank you! Do not hesitate to contact Dr. Latham, Dr. Nasr or myself with new ideas for our Newsletter or Website.
Have a great summer.
* Benjamin Franklin
