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 our winter edition of the CCAS newsletter. As most of you know, our newsletter is a semiannual publication. The winter edition usually applauds the end of a productive year for our society members and also sets the tone for our upcoming yearly winter meeting. In this edition, Dr. Twite presents us with an introduction to what is set to be an exceptional scientific meeting in 2016. This year the meeting will be complemented by a change in format that includes an afternoon session of hands-on workshops. Many of these sessions were chosen to acknowledge the “multidisciplinary” quality of our practice and we hope for them to attract the interest of senior and junior members alike.
When celebrating some of our great achievements of 2015, it is critically important to look back and highlight contributions from our current President and Board of Directors for allowing and supporting new ideas to maintain our membership involvement. More specifically, I wanted to recognize the work done by Viviane Nasr, Gregory Latham, Kim Battle and our website team for allowing us to share a weekly communication in the form of our “Question of the Week” and our “Poll of the Month”. This feature serves as a constant reminder to all that despite well-referenced topics on the questions of the week, there is still an incredible amount of diversity on controversial topics like those depicted on the poll of the month.
In that sense, this edition of our newsletter offers two excellent reviews of controversial and ever-changing topics in our young field. David Faraoni, MD, PhD (Boston Children’s Hospital) and Helen Holtby, MBBS, FRCP(C) (The Hospital for Sick Children) delight us with an in-depth review of the “Perioperative monitoring strategies of coagulation in neonates and children undergoing cardiac surgery”. The content is enlightening and the conclusion is worded precisely to stimulate those interested on the topic. The second featured article on this edition touches on the very delicate balance of oxygen “as needed” and oxygen toxicity in our surgical population. This article comes to us from Patrick Callahan, MD (Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh) and Kelly Machovec, MD, MPH (Duke Children’s Hospital and Health Center). The authors highlight the available evidence on the topic and warrant caution on the application of either extreme. Clearly there is a paucity of knowledge on the topic and a lot of work to be done. An expert commentary on this topic from Dr. James DiNardo follows the article.
Finally, I wanted to take the time to wish you a Happy New Year. I look forward to seeing you in March at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, CO.
