Good morning. I'm Sandra Cain-Gill, and it's been my honor to serve as your Society of Critical Care Medicine President this past year and a pleasure to welcome you to the 2023 Critical Care Congress Digital Event. Our theme this year is better together, and words like community and giving back and paying it forward come to mind. This year, we're expanding our efforts to make sure that wherever the society goes globally, we work together with local institutions to positively impact the community we're in. We're focusing on local organizations where we can provide financial and other support to help them continue the important work they do in their cities, because some of them may one day be our fellow healthcare professionals. In San Francisco, where the in-person Congress is taking place, we are partnering with shelters to help homeless and at-risk individuals access needed services to improve their quality of life, which further supports our health equity initiatives. If you visit SCCM headquarters near O'Hare Airport in Illinois, you'll have the chance to experience the new Max's Cafe. This unique brand represents one of the things our founding president, Dr. Max Harry Weil, enjoyed most. Connecting with colleagues and friends to discuss what was heard in educational sessions and what was going on at everyone's institution. He was well-known for his gatherings where individuals from trainee to expert would meet and debate the important issues of the day. While today you are joining us digitally for Congress through our LearnICU platform, it's important to remember you can still reach out to one another to continue conversations and share lessons learned from sessions watched online. Use the SCCM Connect member forum or online membership director to reach out to your peers for meaningful discussion at the address shown on the screen. Better together also means each of us working in our local communities to make a positive impact outside of our daily professional duties. You may not know that our founding president directed dozens of CPR courses each year in his community, training thousands of individuals in this important and simple life-saving skill. And while our founding fathers led the way in ensuring the society was professionally diverse, they were, in fact, founding fathers. So, your elected council has set forth a broad range of actions and goals which are now being implemented across the society to ensure that every program is diverse in every way possible. We can't truly be better together if our activities do not include the full spectrum of diversity. As an organizational leader in this space, we anticipate our comprehensive DEI program will be replicated by many others. But better together also means working closely with our patients and their families. We all know that care and outcomes are best when our ICU teams have both a strong professional relationship and a close interaction with our patients and their family members. And it's my honor now to tell you about two extraordinary groups who exemplify our better together theme. Levi is a 19-year-old male who required extrication at the scene of his motor vehicle collision and was intubated pre-hospital and admitted to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital with polytrauma and significant burns. By all predictive measures, he should have died from his injuries, but he did not. Any one of his injuries might have taken his life, let alone the constellation of injuries combined. The exceptional multidisciplinary team, spearheaded by the burn surgeon working in tandem with the Surgical Intensive Care Unit team, along with the patient's fight to live and his mother's unparalleled strength and resolve, helped beat the odds and enable a heroic outcome worthy of distinction. Levi is currently home after a stay at rehab and doing well. He is still seen in the burn clinic weekly and requires some touch-up of his skin grafts, but he and his family were able to take a much-needed vacation recently. The continuous compassion, professionalism, dedication, and critical skill set demonstrated throughout his entire length of stay helped Levi achieve progress in his hospitalization course. Without the members of the interprofessional staff, this would not have been possible. Many days, health care providers struggle to find the reasons why we do what we do, and it is heroes like Levi that give us the motivation to keep going. Levi and his family were an inspiration to his entire care team and are truly heroes. Congratulations to Levi and his care team at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital as one group of this year's ICU heroes. Rowan is a 15-year-old male with severe cardiorespiratory failure from COVID-19 and MSSA pneumonia, requiring prolonged ECMO, ventilatory, and CRRT support. Rowan's story is unique in many aspects, starting from the unusual severity of his illness and his prolonged ECMO course. Throughout the pandemic, it's been extremely rare to place children on ECMO due to the COVID-19 pneumonia, and placing a previously healthy, athletic teenager on circuit for a protracted run was both unexpected and challenging. With a 56-day ECMO course that required three configurations, initially VV, then VVA, then VVA utilizing Protec Dual Catheter, this case pushed everyone on his care team at Randall Children's Hospital to the peak of their abilities. Another unique aspect of his story was the placement of the Protec Dual Catheter, which has been used only a handful of times in the pediatric population. With the guidance and experience from other ECMO centers, the care team was able to achieve an excellent outcome utilizing a device which had not been used by any pediatric centers in the Pacific Northwest region previously. The amount of collaboration across hospital systems and subspecialties was enormous, and the ability to do so undoubtedly contributed to Rowan's success. Congratulations to Rowan and his care team at Randall's Children's Hospital as another group of this year's ICU heroes. Thank you all for sharing those inspiring stories. Now, I'd like to tell you about another individual whose lifetime of service and dedication to critical care has been possible from a deep belief in being better together. Dr. John Marshall is this year's Lifetime Achievement Award winner. John is a professor of surgery at the University of Toronto, a critical care physician at St. Michael's Hospital, a senior investigator in the Kenan Research Centre for Biomedical Science. He also holds the Unity Health Chair in Trauma Research. His academic interests lie in the area of sepsis and host innate immune response to trauma and infection. His laboratory studies include the cellular mechanisms that prolong neutrophil survival in critical illness. He has an active clinical research interest in sepsis and ICU-acquired infection, and in outcome measures and the design of clinical trials. He leads the Canadian Institutes of Health research-funded programs in novel clinical trial designs and the treatment of post-resuscitation fluid overload in critically ill patients, and has been an active investigator in multiple clinical trials. He is the Canadian Principal Investigator for the REMAP-CAP, a global platform trial of treatments for COVID-19. He has published close to 600 manuscripts and book chapters, and has been cited more than 145,000 times. Congratulations to John for a lifetime of work that has inspired so many. It's also important we take the opportunity to thank another extraordinary individual, the editor of our journal, Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, Pat Kohanek, who retired in 2020. Pat was our founding editor, and with his colleagues on the editorial board, built the journal, gaining worldwide recognition as the home for important research in pediatric critical care. Pat, a huge thank you from all of us for your careful stewardship and expert management of PCCM. It is very much appreciated. Much of John and Pat's achievements involved education at all levels, and with so many different groups of colleagues and trainees. So today, I also wanted to share with you how we've released a new, improved LearnICU, our online education platform, to give you more tools to educate, train, and help keep you up to date on the latest in our field. You can view this new platform at www.sccm.org backslash LearnICU. It's an impressive system, and we'll continue to expand and improve the resources you have come to rely on during these uncertain times. And while the times we live in may be uncertain, they also create an opportunity for us to double down on Better Together commitment to help many in need, both in the U.S. and around the globe, through SCCM's global health initiatives. For example, when the Ukraine invasion began, many of you stepped up and made donations to SCCM's Emergency Relief Fund, while others got to work seeing what was needed and how we could help. Thanks to both our donors and our doers, we are investing $1.7 million in our Ukraine relief efforts. $600,000 has already been awarded to help hospitals purchase vital equipment and ICU medications. We rapidly translated FCCS Crisis Response and made it available and free to all. And we've recently completed free translated versions of FCCS in both Ukraine and Polish, as many patients and refugees have been relocated. And soon, we will have boots on the ground in Ukraine thanks to our generous gift from our good friends at Direct Relief. In Lviv next month, we will train 150 ICU clinicians in the use of ultrasound. Thanks to our friends at Butterfly, the participants will receive free handheld ultrasound equipment to take back to their hospitals to immediately put their new skills to work caring for patients. And we will keep them connected to our expert faculty via an electronic consultation platform and provide all trainees free access to SCCM's resources as the war persists. Certainly, achievements that rely on better together. As you can tell by now, we aren't your typical medical society. Our humanitarian work spans the globe, providing free training and educational resources like our journal that is available in low resource settings everywhere, as well as supplies, medications, and volunteer clinicians when disaster strikes. From FCCS training done in 25 countries in partnership with USAID to training more than 6,000 individuals in our partnership with every Heartbeat Matters campaign and the CDC, we live the better together mantra every day. If you know an institution that would benefit from free training, you can find the application on the SCCM website at the address shown on the screen. Today, I also want to tell you about an extraordinary new effort with our partners at Direct Relief, focused on three countries in Africa where the need is great. From our prior work across the continent, we knew that while our training programs were impactful in many places, some hospitals lacked essential resources such that training alone would not improve outcomes. To address this issue, we have launched the AIRS project, which stands for Africa Infrastructure Relief and Support. We will begin with an investment of $5.6 million to build sustainable solar-powered oxygen stations and couple that with our fundamentals training programs and membership in the society for their clinicians. This project wouldn't be possible without gifts from people like you and our friends at Direct Relief, and we hope it's the beginning of a new era as we seek to provide more equitable care here at home and across the globe. This exciting new activity dramatically expands the nature of our humanitarian work as we continue to work with partners locally and globally to be better together. I hope you find the Congress Digital Program to be educational and interesting, and that your exploration of the program inspires you to reach out and discuss what you've heard with your peers, both at your institution and worldwide. There is so much we can do when we collaborate to improve care of the critically ill and injured. Thank you so much for joining us.

Critical Care Congress Digital Event

health equity

ICU heroes

diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives

global health initiatives