Message from the President
By Kirk Lalwani
SPA President
I hope you all had a relaxing Thanksgiving and holiday period with family, friends, and loved ones. As we start the New Year, it is incumbent upon us to thank everyone whose support makes it possible for us to successfully care for our patients, and to help those who are less fortunate or going through hard times.
Preparations are in full swing for the upcoming Winter Meeting in the Bahamas, with a record number of abstract acceptances and brisk room bookings. The program on the SPA website looks amazing, thanks to our talented meeting planning team. All tracks will be recorded on video for purchase by attendees, and eventually by all members who were unable to attend. Kim Battle sent out the email with a link to purchase the video recordings of our Annual Meeting held in Orlando in case you missed it.
The Board approved some new Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in November, and I have listed them below along with contact details of a chairperson for those of you who are interested in being involved in the SIG. The SIGs are: Wellness (Dr. Rebecca Margolis, rmargolis@chla.usc.edu); Disaster Preparedness (Dr. Meera Gangadharan, meeraganga@gmail.com ); Environmental Sustainability (Dr. Diane Gordon, Diane.Gordon@childrenscolorado.org). Please send them an email to get involved at this early stage, as you will be in a prime position to help shape the activities of the SIG. As a reminder, the BOD approved a Burns SIG (Dr. Adam D’Souza, adam.joseph.d'souza@emory.edu), and a Pediatric Blood Management SIG (Dr. Norma Klein, nklein@ucdavis.org) earlier this year as well.
The BOD would also like to congratulate our two Young Investigator Awardees, Dr. Michele A. Hendrickson, MD, from Riley Hospital for Children in Indiana (Strategies for Reducing Unused Opioids and Improving Opioid Disposal Following Major Pediatric Surgeries), and Dr. Sydney Brown, MD, PhD, from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (Quantifying the Risk of Post-Anesthesia Care Escalation and Post-Escalation Recovery Trajectories: Classical Statistical and Machine Learning Approaches). They will each receive a grant of $50,000 from the SPA Patient Safety and Education Research Fund. The BOD is very grateful to Dr. Chuck Berde and his committee for their efforts to review the submitted proposals.
The SPA GME Fellowship Taskforce continues its work in drafting recommendations for training future pediatric anesthesiologists. The BOD has authorized funding to contract with an outside agency so the taskforce can draft its recommendations following an independent Delphi process for consensus building on any modifications to the way we currently train our pediatric fellows.
SPA, SPPM and CCAS have a robust Social Media presence, so please visit our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter (SPA @PediAnesthesia, SPPM @PedsPainMed, and CCAS @PedsCardiacAnes), or on Instagram.
I’d like to wish you all a very Happy and Prosperous New Year and I look forward to seeing many of you in the Bahamas. I’ll leave you with two inspirational quotes for your New Year Resolutions.
"Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties." Helen Keller
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” Nelson Mandela
