Greetings
to all of you and I hope that you have had an enjoyable summer! I have a number
of exciting developments to share with you.
Greetings
to all of you and I hope that you have had an enjoyable summer! I have a number
of exciting developments to share with you.
First, planning is actively underway for SOAP 2002 to be held in Hilton Head, SC, May 1-5. Based on your feedback, meeting planners Gary Vasdev, M.D. and Joy Hawkins, M.D. will offer several new educational opportunities including an optional Neonatal Advanced Life Support certification course and an optional Hands On Airway Management Course. Abstract submission will again be online with the site going live on November 1, 2001 and abstracts due by January 31, 2002. Enhancements have been made to the site to facilitate data entry. Hilton Head is a wonderful venue for the entire family with the resort offering sailing, swimming, tennis, golf and kayaking so bring the whole family!
For those of you with innovative ideas about education, the 2002 meeting will be the first opportunity to compete for the SOAP Research in Education Award. The criteria for this award follows on page 2. Also, in response to your feedback, the Research Committee, under the direction of Chair Robert D'Angelo, MD, has standardized abstract grading forms and judging forms for the oral competitions at the meetings. The judging criteria can be seen on SOAP's website <www.soap.org> under the section for meetings.
The Hilton Head meeting will offer another "first". SOAP has received approval from the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide CME credits for its meetings. The Society had to go through an extremely rigorous evaluation to receive this accreditation and I want to thank Dr. Alan Santos, Stewart Hinckley and Bob Specht at Ruggles for seeing this through to completion. Having this accreditation will also decrease meeting expenses for the Society, as we previously have had to pay the Society for Education in Anesthesia to provide our CME credits. Society members play a critical role in maintaining our accreditation by completing meeting evaluations and communicating ideas for future meetings to the annual meeting planners.
In case you just can't wait until next spring for your next dose of SOAP, please attend the Sol Shnider Breakfast Panel at this year's ASA meeting. It will be held Tuesday, October 16, 2001 from 7:30 - 8:45 am at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel. Topics include: an update on coding for OB anesthesia services, complying with new ASA and ACOG guidelines, severe preeclampsia and spinal anesthesia, and the platelet count and regional anesthesia.
The next time that you are online, check out SOAP's enhanced website at www.SOAP.org, which now includes online dues payment, registration for the annual meeting and a regularly updated, password protected membership roster.
During the upcoming year, the Society will be considering several new potential areas of involvement. Shortly after the Annual Meeting some SOAP members were invited to attend a symposium sponsored by the Maternity Center Association (MCA) and the New York Academy of Medicine entitled "The Nature and Management of Labor Pain, An Evidence Based Symposium". The MCA is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1918 that works to improve the quality of maternity care in the U.S. through innovative woman and family-centered approaches to maternity care. MCA is involved in prenatal care, childbirth education, nurse-midwifery education and care in out-of-hospital birth centers. The objectives of the symposium included making accurate information about labor pain and methods to relieve it easily available to relevant health care professionals, childbearing women and the general public; to improve women's access to a choice of reasonably safe and effective pharmacological and non-pharmacological methods for pain relief during labor and assure that women receive full information on all methods of labor pain relief available in their place of birth; to identify gaps in our knowledge base and develop research priorities. Obstetricians, nurse midwives, childbirth educators, pediatricians, epidemiologists, and public health researchers attended the meeting. A unique aspect of this meeting was that all presentations had to be put in paper format and submitted for peer review prior to the meeting. These papers were critiqued and the presentations adjusted accordingly. Dr. Lawrence J. Saidman (former Editor-in-Chief of Anesthesiology) was the reviewer representing our specialty. Thus, the quality of presentations was quite high. We were well represented by Drs. Caton, Leighton, and Rosen, each of whom spoke on various aspects of labor analgesia. It was an extremely interesting experience and not nearly as "anti-anesthesia" as I expected the meeting to be. I walked away with a greater understanding of the viewpoint of the non-anesthesiologists in attendance. There was no debate that epidural analgesia is the safest and best form of labor analgesia for women with any sort of complicated delivery or significant co-existing medical problem. The real issue for many of the attendees was that for healthy women with normal pregnancies and labors, the increasing predominance of epidural analgesia has resulted in decreased availability of alternative techniques (Jacuzzis, birthing balls, Doulas etc.). For those women who truly want an un-medicated labor, these alternatives are increasingly scarce. Although some of the participants were clearly anti-epidural, I had the sense that the majority was more interested in assuring the continued availability of non-pharmacologic options than anti-epidural. The proceedings from this symposium will be published in a January supplement to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. I am working on a mechanism to get this supplement to SOAP members. As a result of this meeting, I have been invited to sit on the National Advisory Council for the Maternity Center Association's Listening to Mothers national survey of women's experiences with childbirth.
On the international front, SOAP has been approached by the ASA Overseas teaching program at Ghana Medical School to assist with training in neonatal resuscitation and obstetric anesthesia. The SOAP Education Committee is working on this project.
Richard Wissler, MD represented the Society at a recent exploratory meeting with MedTeams. This is a group sponsored by the Department of Defense that looks at how teams function and ways of improving that function in order to enhance patient care. They have recently completed a project with Emergency Medicine. They are now considering developing a curriculum to promote teamwork between Obstetricians, Anesthesiologists and labor and delivery nurses working in labor and delivery units.
Finally, the Society has had preliminary discussions with the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology to consider this site as a repository for SOAP documents, newsletters and other memorabilia.
It is shaping up to be an exciting year and I look forward to reporting the Society's progress to you as the year progresses.