Robert C. Tasker, MA, MBBS, MD, FRCP, FRCPCH: Welcome to June 2023. My name is Robert Tasker and I'm your Editor-in-Chief of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine. Lots of great content this month with a focus on 'what' questions. What about having a primary PICU team for complex long-stay patients? The first study comes from Madrigal et al. It's a survey from pediatric critical care fellowship programs covering 72 centers in the United States and there's an accompanying editorial. The second study is what should we know about and do about pulse oximetry and race? This comes from Savorgnan et al and many of you will be familiar with the data from adult COVID-19 patients and race. The United States FDA had a special safety communication and meeting in November 2022 to discuss this issue and a bulletin was put out to all in the field. Now, we have a report of over 2,700 patients all with COVID-19, 61% black and the authors have looked at the bias between SpO2
and SaO2. In my view, I think this is the most important paper we have had for a long time there are many issues related to this. Many authors as they submit work I often ask them to address this question when they look at Sa02 and Sp02. Do read. Then finally, what can we learn about electrophysiologic monitoring of tonic diaphragmatic activity during exploration as part of breathing? This comes from Plante et al. We've had a number of articles about the diaphragm and this adds to this literature. The authors have looked at 200 intubated patients, 222 other patients with NIV and a focus on bronchiolitis. There's an editorial on the whole question of work of breathing. In the PCCM Connections section, I focused on severe illness in resource limited settings. We have a special article from the SCCM Pediatric Sepsis Definition Task Force. I give you a little review about articles that we've had from Kenya, South Africa and Malawi. Now this month, we have a report from the first PICU in Malawi, 28% mortality, worth reading to explore their experience. Finally, there's a narrative PCCM Narrative called She Wept. Looking forward to seeing you next month. Thank you for your support to all our authors and reviewers. Good day.
