On behalf of the Society for Pediatric Anesthesia (SPA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), I am excited and honored to welcome you to the SPA-AAP Pediatric Anesthesiology 2022 Meeting, April 1-3, 2022! The theme for this year’s meeting is Pediatric Anesthesia and 35 Years of the SPA—Our History, Lessons Learned, and the Future.
Welcome to Tampa, FL, where we will hopefully all be able to gather IN PERSON for our 2022 meeting. I don’t think that any of us fully anticipated the extent to which Covid-19 would impact our lives, our work, and our travel. We recognize that come early April 2022 we may still be in a situation where traveling to the meeting may not be possible for all of you. We are committed to delivering an educational, innovative, hopefully entertaining meeting to our SPA community and beyond, and have planned a hybrid meeting with both in-person and virtual and virtual options.
Tampa boasts average April temperatures with highs in the upper 70s to low 80s. Our meeting will take place at the newly renovated Marriott Tampa Water Street and JW Marriott Tampa. We will be learning and connecting near the Tampa Riverwalk, Florida Aquarium, ZooTampa, Amalie Arena and Sparkman Wharf. The conference is conveniently located within walking distance to many restaurants and activities as well as a short drive to beautiful beaches!
This year, we are celebrating the 35th Anniversary of the SPA! I wanted to honor this achievement and celebrate the wonderful clinicians, educators, mentors, and friends who have built this amazing organization. The Society for Pediatric Pain Medicine (SPPM) will hold their 9th Annual Meeting March 30-31, and the Congenital Cardiac Anesthesia Society (CCAS) will present their 2022 Annual Meeting on March 31. The program chairs for each of these programs, Dr. Deepa Kattail (SPPM) and Dr. Greg Latham (CCAS) have put together wonderful program content that we hope you will take advantage of. Meeting details can be found at sppmmmg.org (SPPM) and ccasmmg.org (CCAS). Thank you to both Dr. Kattail and Dr. Latham for their dedication and collaboration! The SPA meeting will hold 2 workshops on March 31st and there will also be a joint SPA-SPPM workshop to be held this day.
On Friday morning, we will begin the day with PBLDs and breakfast with the exhibitors. We will then start our meeting program off by having none other than the founder of our organization, Dr. Myron Yaster speak on the history of the SPA. Dr. Yaster will start off the session that is dedicated to the history and future of Pediatric Anesthesiology. Following his talk, Dr. Randy Flick will discuss the history of pediatric anesthetics. Dr. Paul Stricker will share with us how multicenter registries can help improve patient outcomes, and finally Dr. Justin Lockman and Dr. Aditee Ambardekar will challenge us with the vision for pediatric anesthesiology training in the years to come.
Following this opening session and a coffee break we will switch gears to focus on monitoring technology. We will take a look to the past, present and future and how various modes of monitoring have been shaped and how they continue to evolve to influence our practice. After a discussion on the monitoring technologies, Dr. Stephen Hays and Dr. Myron Yaster will introduce our AAP Advocacy Lecture speaker, Dr. David Nichols. Dr. Nichols will take us through the past, present and future of the impact of pediatrics on our specialty.
Just before we break for lunch, the AAP Robert M. Smith Award will be presented to Dr. Shobha Malviya. Since 1986, this award has been given to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the field of pediatric anesthesiology. Dr. Malviya has had a wonderful career as a clinician, educator, researcher, and mentor. She is a (recently retired!) professor of anesthesiology at University of Michigan and has impacted so many of us in our paths to becoming pediatric anesthesiologists and members of the SPA. She is so very deserving of this award, and we can’t wait to celebrate Dr. Malviya!
After lunch on Friday, we will return to the general session for our joint session with the SPPM. We will have 3 short lectures focusing around reducing postoperative opioids. Followed by another PEDx style session highlighting SPA Committees and Special Interest Groups (SIGs). To finish off our day of learning on Friday, we have a special session acknowledging pediatric anesthesiologists as leaders.
As always, there will be workshops taking place in the late afternoon on Friday. And don’t forget to join us for the Exhibitor Reception on Friday evening!
When we gather again on Saturday morning, we will start our day with the Moderated Case Reports poster session and breakfast with our exhibitors. Our main program will begin with a session on the burden of inequity. We are thrilled to have Dr. Bukky Nafiu discussing the past and present looking at disparity in pediatric surgical patients, followed by our international scholar, Dr. Rodrigo Lopez Barreda from Chile, discussing the present and future in barriers to congenital cardiac care in Latin America and Beyond.
We will then have our AAP Ask the Experts session. We are very excited to be including this session on Breastfeeding medicine, as this is such an important part of caring not only for our infant patients who are breastfed, but also in caring for ourselves, colleagues, and trainees.
Following a morning break with exhibitors, we will have a session featuring the ever-popular Lightning Abstracts led by Dr. Jorge Galvez, followed by oral presentations and poster awards, and culminating in the Moderated Posters Discussions. Coming back after lunch, we will again have PEDx style talks focusing on some hot topics in peds anesthesia.
We will conclude our day with a session on Environmental Care. We will have not one but two special non-SPA guests in this session. And we will finish off this session with a talk from Ms. Maggy Hurchalla, who is an environmental activist and has, among other awards, been named the Everglades Coalition’s Conservationist of the Year (2002). She will be talking to us about the complex issue surrounding Everglades restoration and how children are impacted by the demise of this ecosystem.
We will again have 2- and 3-hour workshops offered on Saturday afternoon. We will also have PBLDs and Expert Round Tables held at this time and again on Sunday morning.
We hope you will all join us for the SPA Gala on Saturday evening, for fun, food, dancing, and music. The theme of the Gala will be “Cruising through the Past and Sailing into the Future, Celebrating 35 Years of the SPA.” The event will be held on the terrace at the Marriott Tampa Water Street. This is an optional, ticketed event, so make sure to sign up (guests are welcome)!
Plan to leave Tampa later on Sunday (or better yet, stay and enjoy the area after the meeting), so you don’t miss out on Sunday’s topics! We will start the main session in the morning learning from Dr. Guelay Bilen-Rosas about how to create a novel device, followed by updates from the SPA Young Investigator research award recipients, and wrap up with a discussion of the notable papers from the past year and beyond from our three main journals. We will complete the meeting with a very important discussion on career mindfulness and resiliency. I think we can all agree that these past two years have been a struggle in some way, and Dr. Nancy Hagerman will talk to us about how we can be mindful during chaos. Dr. Rebecca Margolis will share her thoughts and expertise on how we can “heal the healer.” And it seems most appropriate that Dr. Shobha Malviya will be our final speaker this year. She will speak about how we can age out responsibly from clinical practice.
At the conclusion of our meeting, we will have accumulated a maximum of 25.75 CME credit hours and includes up to 4.5 MOCA® Part II Patient Safety credits. We have 18 wonderful workshops that have been carefully chosen by Dr. Titi Aina who is an amazing meeting co-chair and workshop coordinator, along with her shadow, Dr. Alecia Stein. They have chosen nine new workshops in addition to some of the tried-and-true favorites! Dr. Justin Long has put together not only a very strong PBLD line-up, but also many amazing “Expert Round Tables,” where you have the opportunity to learn in a smaller group. All PBLDs and Round Tables will be held virtually, where you can participate from the comfort of your own hotel room or home. Dr. Jamie Sinton has been a superb shadow in helping Dr. Long coordinate the PBLDs and Round Tables.
The experience of planning the SPA-AAP Pediatric Anesthesiology 2022 meeting has been an incredible honor. I have been lucky to have an amazing planning committee, the help of the SPA Education Committee, and the support of the SPA Board of Directors. The SPA Education Committee always has invaluable input into the content of our meetings and helps to ensure we utilize our comments and suggestions from you, the meeting attendees. Thank you to Dr. Lisa Wise-Faberowski and Dr. Mary Landrigan-Ossar for their collaboration on the behalf of the AAP Section on Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine. And again, a huge thank you to the 2022 meeting co-chairs Titi Aina and Justin Long, as well as their shadows, Alecia Stein and Jamie Sinton. I could not have put this meeting together without the unending help, dedication, thoughtfulness, and organization of Dr. Bishr Haydar, who has been my program shadow. Thank you, Bishr!
It was devastating to all of us who knew her to hear of the death of our friend, mentor, and colleague, Dr. Lisa Wise-Feberowski. Dr. Wise-Faberowski had a true passion for improving the lives of children and made significant contributions in clinical care, advocacy, education and research, both basic science and clinical. She was an instrumental part of planning this meeting. She is dearly missed and her legacy will be remembered.
I must also send a huge thank you out to Dr. Nina Deutsch, who has been a wonderful support and has offered so much guidance along the way. Thank you to Dr. Kirk Lalwani, who sent me an email about four years ago asking if I wanted to be a program shadow. I (honestly) had no idea what that even meant, but I had the feeling this was not something to turn down! I will forever have gratitude for that opportunity! And of course, thank you to, Dr. Jim Fehr, who I am so lucky to call a mentor, friend, colleague, and more. I do not know how to thank these incredible people for everything they have done and continue to do for me.
Thank you to the SPA community—my colleagues and friends, those I know well and those I have yet to meet. I am grateful for your discussions and ideas that continue to push us all to be better pediatric anesthesiologists!
And last, but not least, thank you to Ms. Kim Battle. I couldn’t have done this without her. We are so lucky to have her as part of our organization. Kim and the rest of the team at Ruggles are the backbone to putting on these meetings each year. Thank you for all you do!
It has been an incredible pleasure and honor to plan this meeting. I hope we can all be together in person to learn a lot, challenge ourselves, collaborate, and have fun!!! See you in Tampa!
All Program & Schedule Times are Eastern Standard Time (EST)