President's Message
The Pillars of Our Mission
By Jason Reynolds, MD
SPS President
“The Society for Pediatric Sedation® (SPS) will strive to be the international multidisciplinary leader in the advancement of pediatric sedation by promoting safe, high quality care, innovative research and quality professional education.”
From this statement, I see three clear pillars that support our overall mission as a Society – Quality, Research, and Education. Each of these pillars has been organized into a committee, which we could consider “mission” committees.
In this issue, and those that follow, I would like to highlight the leadership of these committees and share the collective vision for the work these committees have taken on. This month I will start with the Education Committee, chaired by Dr. Anne Stormorken, a pediatric intensivist at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, which consists of three separate subcommittees – Conference Planning, Provider Course, and Online CME.
The Conference Planning Subcommittee is chaired by Dr. Mary Landrigan, who is a pediatric anesthesiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. Historically, the Society has delegated the bulk of conference planning to the local institutions hosting the conference. As we have matured as a Society, we have started to standardize the conference planning process and bring more and more of the conference operations in-house. Ultimately we expect that this will allow us to continue to grow the conference program each year in a longitudinal fashion and expand the venues where we are able to offer the conference. In the years to come we intend to build on opportunities for members to submit content, thus making the conference a true member-driven event. We look forward to Orlando in 2017 and Salt Lake City to follow in 2018.
The Provider Course Subcommittee is chaired by Dr. Corrie Chumpitazi who is a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Texas Children’s Hospital. Historically the SPS Sedation Provider Course® has been offered in association with the annual conference. In recent years we have also been able to partner with the Pediatric Hospital Medicine community to offer the course at their annual conference and also at the annual fellow’s conference. Moving forward we intend to increase the accessibility of the course through similar partnerships. However, we also want to empower institutional sedation programs to offer the provider course (PC) within their own institutions to train their hospital and medical staff, as well as students, residents and fellows who may be rotating on the sedation service. We have sought to do this by adding complete access to the PC materials to Platinum Institutional Membership.
The Online CME Subcommittee is chaired by Dr. Jim Hertzog, a pediatric intensivist at Nemours / DuPont Hospital for Children in partnership with Dr. Peter Chin, a pediatric anesthesiologist at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. The subcommittee prepares interactive activities quarterly that are released with the newsletter. The feature activity this month, Safe Sedation of the Obese Patient, was prepared by our past president, Dr. Trish Scherrer. These activities are offered as a way to provide education credits to our membership, but moving forward we hope to engage the expertise of our members in the preparation of these materials.
We also continue to look for ways to partner with other organizations that share a common mission as it applies to education in sedation. We are happy to announce that we have partnered with Ziergroup Nitrous Oxide for Pediatric Procedural Sedation. Platinum Institutional Members now receive 10 individual access keys annually with their institutional membership. Additional access keys can be purchased at a discounted rate.
Finally, we have created an Outreach Subcommittee within the larger Membership & Communications Committee. This subcommittee is chaired by Dr. Ben Jackson, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at the Medical University of South Carolina. The primary focus of the committee is to help organize the intellectual resources of the Society membership to advance our mission. In many cases this involves networking our resources to submit proposals for educational workshops to other professional meetings. SPS has been represented at PHM, PAS, ARIN, SCCM, AAPD, NAPNAP and a number of other meetings in the past year where we share the common goal of improving sedation care for children.
This represents a summary of one pillar of our mission. It is a pillar composed of many members from many different backgrounds working together with a shared vision and common purpose. I hope that as you read this you are thinking of ways you too can contribute and be part of that vision. To find out more about the educational opportunities within SPS, you can contact me directly or the individual committee chairs by visiting the committee directory.
