Speaker: Robert C. Tasker, MA, MBBS, MD, FRCP, RCPCH
Robert C. Tasker, MA, MBBS, MD, FRCP, RCPCH: Welcome. My name is Robert Tasker and I'm your Editor-in-Chief of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine. November 2024. Another great issue. We start with the Foreword, which comes from the current and previous presidents of WFPICCS, writing about 25 years of pediatric critical care medicine and also introducing the supplement, which are the abstracts from the Mexico meeting in the summer. Now to my three Editor's Choices. The first is a POCUS program in a single PICU and its evolution from 2017 to 2022. Over 7,000 diagnostic studies, first author Baker and colleagues and there's an accompanying editorial. To go with this, do have a look at 2023 papers on education, training and regulation of POCUS. My second Editor's Choice is about algorithms and an algorithm for new fever and instability and diagnostic stewardship in the type of tests that are ordered. This is by Sick-Samuels et al. Covers a period 2019 to 2022 with over 2,800 cultures. The third Editor's Choice is about ECMO circuits and biofilms. A detailed study by Cai et al. and there's an editorial. Six patients with a close look at their circuits. 2,000 proteins identified, 200 signaling pathways. I really enjoyed reading this and there's a lot of content there. In the PCCM Connections this month it's about severe pneumonia, and the Asian network called PACCMAN have done a study from 2020 to 2022 looking at the diagnoses and the etiologies and the outcome and time course. There are other diagnostic papers to look at that go with this that cover the topic of sustainable development and also have a look at the clinical progression scale that was published in 2023. In the PCCM International section, we have a paper called the Pediatric Sepsis Challenge. The instigators of this competition provide a curated data set of 3,800 Ugandan children aged 6 to 60 months, 2017 to 2020. The task is to generate a model for in hospital mortality. I've highlighted other papers to look at obviously the pediatric sepsis score from 2024, the work of the PEDAL group as a subsection of PALISI, and also look at the other machine learning studies. Lastly to complete your read as well as the other content within PCCM this month, do have a look at the PCCM Narrative which has been written by a PICU fellow and it's called The Power of Goodbyes. So, see you next month. Thank you very much for your support of PCCM.
