Dealing with Adversity, Working Together and Staying Focused!
Dear SNACC Members,
We are all dealing with one of the greatest public health emergencies in recent years. Many of us are actively involved in caring for patients with COVID-19 and preventing the spread of the disease. I hope you all and your dear ones are safe and healthy. SNACC is an international organization and our members are from across the world. We are obviously at various stages of being impacted by COVID-19 and my best wishes are with all of you. The COVID-19 pandemic is a special challenge for anesthesiologists. I extend my sincere gratitude to all of you who are working on the front line to contain this pandemic – I am proud to be a part of this community. I salute your commitment and dedication.
The SNACC leadership is closely watching the situation and anticipating the impact on our activities. We are also in communication with the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) to discuss COVID-19 related issues. Please be assured that the leadership team is working very hard and I am so grateful for this collective wisdom! We have decided to not hold the annual Neuroscience Symposium (scheduled for San Francisco in May). However, we plan to organize this meeting online. The Board of Directors and ICPNT meetings will be held online also. In order to support our committee and taskforce members, we are being very flexible in delaying/readjusting the timelines for tasks that are not time sensitive and focusing only on high priority areas.
We have worked on a communication strategy at SNACC while handling the COVID-19 situation. There is a lot of information being generated and disseminated by several organizations and we have decided to avoid confusion and information overload while focusing on neuroanesthesia-specific issues. Here are a few things we are doing:
- We have posted a COVID-19 resource page on our website. Our communications committee led by Drs. Arnoley Abcejo and Reza Gorji will carefully filter the information being shared with us by the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF) and other international organizations. Links to the most relevant resources will be available through our website.
- I invite all our members to share through our newsletter, their stories, experiences and insights about COVID-19 and how you and your organization are dealing with this disease.
- We have created platforms for SNACC members to have conversations about COVID-19. These are difficult times and folks want to be in touch with colleagues to share and hear from each other. To this end, 1) we have started COVID-19 related discussions on the SNACC blog, 2) we are supporting discussions through our Twitter feed @SNACCNeuro and 3) we are exploring the possibility of creating a WhatsApp group only for SNACC members.
- We will monitor neuroanesthesia-specific scenarios and plan to respond to them more formally. SNACC and the JNA are also working closely on this.
- The leadership team will continue to monitor and periodically discuss our upcoming events.
As we work through this difficult situation, it is critical that we do not lose the sight of our long-term vision and mission. We continue to organize our scientific and educational conference – the 48th Annual Meeting this year in Montréal (September 11-13). We sincerely hope that the meeting will proceed as currently planned. However, if anything changes, we will let our members know.
Once again, I wish you all the very best as we deal with the COVID-19 pandemic together. I am sure with collaborative efforts we will come out successful. Thank you all very much.
Best wishes,
Deepak Sharma MD, DM
President, Society for Neuroscience in Anesthesiology and Critical Care