From the Chair

I am thrilled to share some of the planning that has been going into ACEP Scientific Assembly this year.  As many of you know, one of the main tasks of the leadership team is assembling a great Critical Care Medicine (CCM) Section meeting.  This year, though, our educational afternoon will not be our only Section offering.

On Sunday, September 30, the CCM Section will be offering our first ever pre-conference. Dr. John Greenwood and Dr. Susan Wilcox are developing a program for “Building an ED-ICU” - a half-day conference for those interested in emergency department (ED)-intensive care unit (ICU) development. This conference was a product of the needs assessment that the ACEP CCM Employment Task Force conducted, recognizing a need for education around ED-ICU planning, development, and medical direction. We have a great panel of thought leaders in this area who will be sharing their experiences and training participants in issues surrounding staffing, building, preparing a business plan, and other topics that will be critical to success in their own institutions.

The development of this conference recognizes some of the groundbreaking work that members of our Section have been doing in their own institutions around the country. It also highlights a popular niche that the Section can fill at a pivotal time. The ED-ICU has evolved in many institutions as a solution to the growing problem of critical care boarding in EDs. Our Section continues to explore this problem more broadly through the ED-ICU Task Force through ACEP and the Society of Critical Care Medicine, but this training program will be our Section’s first tangible activity to disseminate these ideas more broadly.

We hope that this pre-conference will be the first in what could be a recurring theme: dedicated half-day educational conferences to share innovation in critical care delivery. While this may not be limited to dual-trained intensivists, this is clearly an area that the College is looking to us to address.  Providing training and guidance can serve the needs of the ACEP membership, but these activities will also likely crystallize the expertise of our specialty in areas of practice where emergency medicine (EM)-critical care providers can provide unique leadership.

If you are interested in participating in the pre-conference, please register with your ACEP Scientific Assembly registration. Seating is limited, and we expect high demand. We are excited to continue this momentum, so we hope to see many of you there!

Nicholas Mohr, MD, FACEP