Health Volunteers Overseas (HVO), in collaboration with the Society for Education in Anesthesia (SEA), is pleased to share that eight anesthesia residents will receive a 2019 SEA-HVO Traveling Fellowship.

The recipients are: 

Health Volunteers Overseas (HVO), in collaboration with the Society for Education in Anesthesia (SEA), is pleased to share that ten anesthesia residents will receive a 2018 SEA-HVO Traveling Fellowship.

The recipients are: Hassan Aboumerhi, MD (University of Chicago); Brenton Alexander, MD (University of California, San Diego); Praba Boominathan, MD (Yale University); Michael Do, MD, MBA (University of California, San Francisco); Cara Ann Iorianni , MD (Emory University School of Medicine); Oneychi Megafu, MBBS (Drexel University College of Medicine); Jose Navas-Blanco, MD (Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit); Samuel Percy, MD (University of Washington Medical Center); Andrew Rivera-Hober, MD (New York Presbyterian Hospital); and David Rudnick, MD (Massachusetts General Hospital).

In advance of our 33rd Spring Meeting, we are pleased to provide a membership update. The figures in this update are tentative, as they may change before the final count.

We anticipate 198 people to attend the 33rd Spring Meeting in Louisville; this includes 22 residents. Our entire membership roster currently includes 330 members, of whom 56 are either residents or fellows.

We would like to cordially invite you to the SEA 34th Spring Meeting, which will be held at the Hilton Denver City Center, Denver CO, April 26-28, 2019. This year’s theme is “Integration and Diversity: Creating Diverse Teams, Building Exceptional Leaders.” The meeting will celebrate the diversity in anesthesiology teams, and share supports for further integration, especially in leadership roles.

We look forward to a keynote address by Renee Navarro, Vice Chancellor of Diversity and Outreach for the University of California San Francisco, and one of the few anesthesiologists serving in such a role. She will share with us the current and potential future state of anesthesiology as we continue to build diverse teams. We further welcome nationally known speakers on the topics of student and resident admissions and education, integrating advanced practice providers, and assisting and welcoming members of the LGBTQ community. We are exceptionally pleased to welcome three women anesthesiology departmental chairs to share their thoughts on women’s leadership in anesthesiology.

The SEA Spring Annual Business Meeting is scheduled for Friday, April 26, 2019 at 12:00pm (Mountain) during the SEA Spring Meeting at the Hilton Denver City Center in Denver, Colorado.

Items on the agenda include:

• Approval of October 12, 2018 Business Meeting Minutes
• Nominations for SEA Board of Directors
• Committee Reports
• Updates and Announcements

The SEA Fall Annual Business Meeting is scheduled for Friday, October 12, 2018 at 12:00pm (Pacific) during the SEA Fall Meeting at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square in San Francisco, California.

Items on the agenda include:

• Approval of April 20, 2018 Business Meeting Minutes
• Announcement of SEA 2018 Election Results
• Committee Reports
• Updates and Announcements

Just a short note to make sure everyone is informed about upcoming society meetings–especially the 2019 series which are proving to be ‘different’ from the offerings of previous years.

• Workshop on Teaching: Please don’t forget about the Workshop on Teaching which will be held in Winter Park, Florida over an extended weekend in late January 2018. (Limited places available with full details on the website).
• The 33rd Spring Meeting will be held in Louisville, KY from April 19 to April 22, 2018. The venue will be the Hyatt Regency, Louisville with the meeting run as a collaboration between the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville. (Additional details)
• The Fall Meeting 2018 will be in San Francisco and will be run by Kristina Sullivan from UCSF. This meeting will be on Friday October 12th and, as in the past, will immediately precede the ASA Annual Meeting.

Then things get a little more complicated…

We would like to cordially invite you to the SEA 33rd Spring Meeting, which will be held at the Hyatt Regency Louisville April 19-22, 2018. To tie into the ACGME’s initiative on wellness, the theme is “Training Professional, Humanistic Anesthesiologists.”  This theme is especially relevant to our fast-paced, technologically advanced world which, according to some academic gurus and observers, is experiencing a crisis of humanism and professionalism in the practice of medicine.

The meeting will open with a plenary address by Dr Thomas J. Nasca, MD, MACP, CEO of the ACGME, professor of medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and senior scholar in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Medicine. Several nationally known speakers will address issues relevant to humanism as panel discussion. Friday will conclude with dynamic and interactive workshops that relate to professionalism and humanism. Dr David Chestnut, MD, Professor and Chief of Obstetric Anesthesiology, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and senior editor of Chestnut’s Obstetric Anesthesia: Principles and Practice will be the plenary speaker for Saturday. The issues relevant to professionalism will be addressed in two TED-style panels discussion followed by additional workshops.

At the 2017 Society for Education in Anesthesia (SEA) Spring Business Meeting, Dr. Stephen Kimatian, SEA Immediate Past-President and Chairperson of the Bylaws Committee had a call for volunteers to serve on the Bylaws Committee to review the SEA Bylaws and make recommendations for any amendments. A summary of the proposed amendments was presented at the 2017 Fall Meeting on October 20, 2017 and are now being circulated for your review.

Please click the link below to download a draft of the proposed Bylaws amendments.

The SEA Spring Annual Business Meeting is scheduled for Friday, April 20, 2018 at 11:50am (Eastern) during the SEA Spring Meeting at the Hyatt Regency in Louisville, Kentucky.

Items on the agenda include:

• Approval of October 20, 2017 Business Meeting Minutes
• Nominations for SEA Board of Directors
• Approval of Proposed Bylaws Amendments
• Committee Reports
• Updates and Announcements

Video report of the 2018 SEAd Grant, Working Memory Interruptions and Errors in Anesthesiology: A Randomized, Controlled, Simulation-Based Study

Ashley Szabo Eltorai, MD
Yale University School of Medicine
Department of Anesthesiology

The SEA Nominating Committee (Chaired by Immediate Past-President Stephen J. Kimatian, MD, FAAP) is seeking candidates for the following positions on the Society for Education in Anesthesia Board of Directors:

• President-Elect (One Position - Two-year term, October 2018 to October 2020, immediately followed by a two-year term, October 2020 to October 2022, as President)
• Secretary (One Position - Two Year Term)
• Treasurer (One Position - Two Year Term)
• Director (Three Positions - Two Year Term)

If you are interested in running for one of the positions, please send a short letter of intent to Andrew Bronson, CAE ([email protected]) and Stephen J. Kimatian, MD, FAAP ([email protected]) by Friday, April 13, 2018. Self-nominations for these positions will also be accepted during the Business Meeting held at the SEA Spring Meeting on Friday, April 20, 2018. The slate of nominees will also be finalized at the Business Meeting.

Amy Murray, MD	Mike Wiisanen, MD

Greetings to our loyal SEA members! As we reflect on the SEA Fall Meeting 2016 held in Chicago on Friday Oct 21st, we are reminded of this meeting’s traditional (and convenient) attachment to the ASA Annual Meeting. However, our one-day SEA meeting really stood out and held its own against any conference. Why might that be? A few suggestions:

• Perhaps it was the beautiful and historic Hilton Chicago Hotel overlooking Grant Park, Lake Michigan, and the Museum Campus…a destination in its own right?
• Maybe it was the diverse topics and the varied presentation styles of the talented speakers who expertly delivered thought-provoking content?
• Or is it possible that connecting with our SEA colleagues, those familiar friends who consistently show dedication to anesthesiology education and provide ongoing support for one another, is actually worth the plane, train or automobile trip in and of itself?

We choose the third option as the best response!

As we focused on the Clinical Learning Environment (CLE), Dr. Kevin Weiss, our McLeskey lecture award recipient, started off the meeting summarizing some of the details from the National Report of Findings and fielded some very pointed questions from our engaged audience. Dr. Weiss is the ACGME’s Senior Vice President, Institutional Accreditation and co-Chair of the CLER Evaluation Committee. One takeaway: experiential learning and interprofessional collaboration are necessary for quality and safety projects, as are qualified mentors. Future directions: well-being for residents, fellows and faculty. We will stay tuned for the growing body of resources available for each CLE to achieve “excellence”.

In this, my first President’s Corner article, I would like to try and answer the question that Past President Steve Kimatian posed in the September issue of the Newsletter. He asked, “Where to from here?”, and he outlined the progress that the society has made over the past year. This included the landmark achievements of our endowed Starter Grant in Education (The SEAd Grant) and the inclusion of our Journal of Education in Perioperative Medicine (JEPM) in the PubMed Central database.

I am also very pleased to report the establishment of the Philip Liu Awards for Innovations in Anesthesia Education, graciously endowed by the Liu family, which was represented at our Fall Meeting by his widow, Dr. Letty Liu. Dr. Philip L. Liu was the founding president of the SEA, and he was dedicated to the society becoming a force for innovation in anesthesiology education. Dr. Liu spent most of his academic career in the Harvard system at the Massachusetts General and Peter Brigham Hospitals. He later served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. He was the first recipient of the SEA / Duke Award for Excellence and Innovation in Anesthesia Education (1997). Fittingly, the Liu family has established two annual Innovation in Education awards as a tribute to his life and contribution to our Society: One is for Innovation in Curriculum, and the other is for Innovation in Education Research. The inaugural awards will be awarded at the 2017 SEA Spring Meeting in Jacksonville, Florida. Each $1000 award recipient will be selected from the abstracts submitted to the Research committee and presented at the Spring meeting.

Swapna Chaudhuri, MD, PhD	John Lawrence, MD, MEd

One of the important objectives of our committee is to introduce our membership to various technological tools that can assist anesthesiology educators and learners in enhancing medical education. To that end, we were privileged to conduct highly informative workshops during the spring and fall meetings in 2016, ranging from “Zoom” and “Hangouts” web conferencing apps to Gamify-ing clinical & classroom-based learning and ways to enhance our personal & professional “Cyber Security”. We intend to continue this important endeavor this year, and look forward to strong participation at our workshops again this year!

We are also thrilled to inform you that SEA-Q (Question of the Month) is going strong, thanks to excellent question submissions from members of our various committees. This online interactive educational activity, hosted on the home page of our SEA website, has been receiving increasing participation – even up to 150 respondents per question! We are extremely pleased to inform that thanks to this communal effort, we are now in the 22nd straight month of SEA-Q posting, which has produced a decent array of questions in the field of medical education. Please feel free to check them out regularly and frequently; we hope to continue increasing our valuable bank in the coming months.

SEA is pleased to announce a new award for members. Starting in 2017, two awards for research will be presented in honor of Dr. Philip Liu, a founding member of SEA. This award was established by the gracious benevolence of the Liu family, and we were pleased to have Dr. Letty Liu and Dr. Leila Mei Pang with us for the announcement at the 2016 Fall meeting.

Dr. Phil Liu was a founding member of SEA in 1984. He was active in education throughout his career. He was part of the Interhospital Study Group that initiated the Anesthesia Knowledge Test (AKT), which is still in use today. Through his support at the ASA, PBLDs were included at every annual meeting. Many SEA members participate in this highly educational activity. Dr. Liu was not only a founding member of SEA but also remained active even after his retirement. SEA members will remember his lively involvement in discussions and his wonderful sense of humor.

Health Volunteers Overseas (HVO) is pleased to announce Jo Davies, MBBS, FRCA is a recipient of the eleventh annual HVO Golden Apple Award. As part of its World Health Day observances and in celebration of World Health Worker Week, HVO recognizes the extraordinary contributions of HVO members, volunteers and supporters to HVO’s mission, organization and/or project sites. Each individual honored with this award has demonstrated an impressive commitment to HVO’s mission to improve global health through the education, training, and professional development of the health workforce in resource-scarce countries.

As project director for HVO’s anesthesia training project in Malawi, Dr. Davies has put her heart and soul into ensuring the success of the program—even traveling to the site every 18 months to run the final exams for anesthesia students. Her devotion to the HVO mission has helped foster a strong, sustainable training program in Malawi. In addition to her volunteer assignments, she is currently serving a three-year rotation on HVO’s Anesthesia Steering Committee. In total, she has contributed more than 110 volunteer service days.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Book author: Rebecca Skloot

This was a book that a good friend gave me just before the trip to the ASA last year. I needed something to read during the long flight to the west coast and this seemed to fit the bill. The book was riveting and managed to keep me engaged, not just on the flight to the ASA, but also on my way back.