Meeting Minutes December 1996
In the past 9 months there has been real progress in assembling a working group of individuals representing members of the Pediatric Section of SCCM and some invited guests.
At the Colloquium in Milwaukee in September 1996 A group of perhaps 20 met at the Colloquium in Milwaukee in September. Barry Markovitz reported a summary to the attendees on 10/1/96. The gist of that summary follows:
- The PICU list: remains hugely popular, offering a "live" forum for a range of topics to share experiences and opinions.
- The PedsCCM web site - current issues: while there seems to be a good sense that this has become a valuable resource for our subspecialty, there were some issues that arose that could stand clarification. -
- The Hypertextbook (HPCCM): it seems clear that this play-on-words metaphor may be misleading, both in seeking contributions of original material and in the expectations of the reader. Perhaps a "cyber-file cabinet" would be a better paradigm, as the intent is not to mimic or re-create a standard print textbook. The idea is to collect topic reviews, lectures, or outlines that people might have already written or presented. Some of the material was initially posted on the PICU list, e.g., Adrienne Randolph's meta-analysis of the ribavirin studies or Randy Flick's ARDS mechanical ventilation principles; we wrote to them and asked them to tighten it up a bit for inclusion in the HPCCM. A lot of people have lectures sitting around on ICP management, fluid resuscitation, sedation and analgesia, etc., that they've given locally and are now sitting idle on their hard disks. We propose to collect such resources for sharing; both for the individual reader to learn from and to use in their own educational programs. !
- Literature Reviews: we believe this section would highlight the most pertinent and/or controversial current literature (print or online) in a "Yearbook" format. This would serve to keep readers up-to-date about developments as well as make it easier for more people to contribute. Do we think this is really valuable? If so, how can we light a spark under the effort to get it going? One idea is to assign individuals different journals to follow; as a pertinent article appears in one's journal, he/she would compose a brief summary and critique for posting in this section on the site. Comments? Volunteers?
- PedsCCM - future ideas: as we noted at the meeting and on Friday morning, I think there are three areas that the site could develop: -
- Research collaboration: a database of current multi-institutional clinical trials, complete with an outline of each protocol (hypothesis, subjects, methods, statistics - including "power" calcs) and contact information. If we're nervous making this public, it could be password-protected. We're gonna' have to trust that no one within our community would want to (or be able to and get away with it!) steal ideas for multi-center trials. It would seem logical to me that the PCCSG might want to play a role in this, but whether or not all the studies listed are "official" PCCSG studies might understandably influence how we set this up. Perhaps Tanya Gee (Dallas' research coordinator and creator of our new list o' meetings) and Steve Pon could work together here.
- Clinical strategies: with all the talk of managed care, TQI, and pathways both on the PICU list and at the Colloquium, developing a repository on the web site of such strategies for sharing would seem a no-brainer. We've actually had a call for such things on our "help" page for a while, but this needs to have a dedicated section and a champion. Any takers??
- Clinical trials database: as I mentioned Friday morning, Adrienne Randolph has talked about setting up a database of clinical trials pertinent to critical care (adults and kids) with standardized evidence-based assessments of them. This is potentially a huge project and hopefully grant-fundable.
- The (electronic) Journal of Pediatric Critical Care: a proposal was circulated and discussed with some entusiasm. NLM indexing: one issue we were assigned to investigate was to find out what it would take to get such a journal indexed by the National Library of Medicine. David Jardine and Steve Schexnayder have agreed to look into this issue.
The SCCMPIWG e-mail disussion forum A forum for SCCMPIWG discussions was established in December 1996. Anyone interested in working on projects with the group can be added to the mailing list by contacting Carl Weigle. The list is an e-mail alias, which means that it is not a full fledged listproc or listserv managed forum with digest functions, etc. It does however have a very usable link to a WWW site for archives of messages posted through the alias. The archives can be viewed by date, author, subject, or thread.
Posted 12/96 by Carl Weigle
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