2012 Annual Report

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Society of Anesthesia and Sleep Medicine
Annual Report • October 2012

I am pleased to present the 2012 Annual Report for the Society of Anesthesia and Sleep Medicine (SASM) following the first full year of operation since its first formal annual scientific meeting in Chicago last year. 
Founding a new society is challenging, requiring creation of an organizational structure within a not-for-profit regulatory framework, establishing an administration, recruiting and engaging members, securing funding, promoting professional activity and developing relationships and influence with other professional bodies, commerce, and the broader community and its leadership. We have made significant progress in all these respects.

Funding
Since our last meeting we have secured funding from many helpful and supportive sponsors which provides us with a very secure financial base. These sponsors are listed in our meeting program. Through their generous support they demonstrate their understanding of the importance of our work and their confidence in us. We are very grateful for this help, as without it the progress I will outline in the remainder of this re-port would have been impossible. 

Organizational Structure
When we met last year we were constituted under the laws of Ohio, where we are registered. Since then we have been approved as a not-for-profit by the IRS, an important step ensuring our tax-exempt status. We have developed an organizational framework to deal with executive and financial matters and our professional activity (fig 1). 

Fig 1. 
These committees have been busy over the last year building momentum in their areas of responsibility. 

Administration
Apart from its role in developing policy, the executive committee has done much of the day to day administration of the Society. Norman Bolden has run membership matters from his office including administration of our website. Peter Gay has been very hands-on in organising and administering our financial affairs. These are tasks that have required day to day attention and we have been very concerned to secure administrative support. A number of ways of doing this have been considered, including employing an executive assistant directly and forming a strategic alliance with a host professional body. Several months ago we identified a likely organisation that specialises in administering small professional organisations in the not-for profit sector and, after considerable enquiry, we contented ourselves that they were suitable. I am pleased to inform you that we have recently agree to contract with Svinicki Association Management Inc (SAMI) for provision of management and administrative services for our Society. This will ensure that we continue to provide a high level of service to our members and equip us for future growth. Importantly, it will relieve our executive from significant ad-ministrative burden, which is unsustainable in the longer term and undesirable both in creating over-dependence on the efforts of a few and complicating hand-over of responsibilities between successive office holders. 

Recruitment
Our major recruitment takes place in and around our annual scientific meeting as it is our most obvious showcase and draws together so may people of like interests. Our mission is to advance standards of care for clinical problems shared by Anesthesiology and Sleep Medicine, including pen-operative management of sleep disordered breathing, and to promote interdisciplinary communication, education and research in matters common to anesthesia and sleep. We want to create a broad community of anesthesiologists, sleep physicians, scientists, nurses and other health professionals to fulfill this. Our membership is steadily growing as we engage a growing circle of individuals and organisations interested in various aspects of the interrelationships that exist be-tween anesthesia and sleep. We have devised a number of categories of membership to facilitate recruitment and are pleased with the large numbers who have chosen to be "gold patrons". 

Communication
Our website has been at the core of our activities from the outset. We have been fortunate to have Norman Bolden and our, webmaster, Jamison Lam, to drive the development of this important resource.

Girish Joshi and his subcommittee have done a remarkable job in producing 3 newsletters over the last year as planned. These have been attractive, informative and highly readable. Frances Chung and her group have presented literature updates and featured articles in the area of anesthesia and sleep medicine every two months for one year. This provides an important educational resource for health care professionals and industry. 
An internet based discussion group is another innovation of the last year, run by John Loadsman. This is a valuable tool that allows for direct dialogue with colleagues, including sharing clinical problems and advice. 
Society news has also been shared with a wider anesthesiology audience through two articles in ASA newsletters.

Educational Programs
The centrepiece of our educational activity has, of course, been our annual scientific meeting. Our busy Conference and Education committee have been magnificently led by Frances Chung and her deputy. Babak Mokhlesi. Last year's program was very well attended and received and this year the program has been expanded to cover 1.5 days. The program again presents cutting edge science and a strong postgraduate educational component. We are again fortunate to have a strong faculty of speakers drawn from both sleep medicine and anesthesiology. Coupled with this we have a fine array of presentations of original work, which has been carefully marshalled byYandong Jiang and his abstract committee.

Research agenda
The Clinical and Research Committee, under Roop Kaw, has taken the first steps to-wards development of a white paper articulating a research agenda that identifies key gaps in knowledge that need to be addressed to take the field of anesthesia and sleep further. The lack of seed funding for research in the area of anesthesia and sleep is a challenge for the field in attracting and retaining young investigators. As a first step in our efforts to help assemble a body of evidence we have been examining ways to develop a registry of postoperative outcomes in OSA patients. A formal registry of prospectively collected data is envisaged. This will take time and money to organise. In the meantime, as a first pass, a group has been working to assemble a case series of "dead in bed" and "near miss" cases to provide preliminary data to justify such funding. This work continues under the joint leadership of Roop Kaw and Norman Bolden. 

Service Development, Practice Guidelines, Education
We are keen develop clinical standards and to promote education about sleep amongst anesthesiologists and about anesthesiology amongst sleep physicians. We have estab-lished a teaching and training subcommittee under the Clinical and research Committee to help further this agenda. These are big issues. The evidence base on which to develop guidelines remains thin and is forestalling further evolution of practice parameters from large organisations such as the ASA, which published its guideline in 2006. There has been sufficient progress since to create a significant gap between these aging guidelines and current knowledge. This invites two responses from SASM: a) a desire to develop guidelines of our own as an interim measure: then b) to use such an effort to prepare the ground to promote and facilitate the development of guidelines by senior societies, perhaps through a multi-society collaboration. We certainly seek to encourage discussion between societies such as the ASA. ATS and AASM regarding these matters of common interest. 

Involvement in Activity of Other Professional Societies
SASM members have been active in sleep and anesthesia symposia at annual meetings of the American Society of Anesthesiology, American College of Chest Physicians, International Anesthesia Research Society and World Congress on Sleep Apnea. These activities have been well attended and characterised by lively discussion, attesting to the considerable interest our field holds for related groups. In each of these forums we have presented under the aegis of SASM 

Outreach: Publications/Relationships with other Professional Bodies
Over the course of the year we have had discussions with, among others, executive and committee members of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, American Thoracic Society, American Academy of Sleep Medicine, International Anesthesia Research Society and American Society of Post Anesthesia Nursing to promote education, training and research in anesthesia and sleep. This has resulted in joint education activities such as those just referred to above.

Relationships with Community and Government
Earlier this year SASM joined the National Sleep Awareness Round Table, with Ralph Lydic attending a meeting on our behalf. This is a coalition of government, professional and voluntary organisations sponsored by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) to in-crease awareness, promote informed policy and support research into and clinical care of sleep disorders. We see this as a means of increasing the profile of anesthesia and sleep at community and government level. We have prepared and submitted a paper to the NSF newsletter "Sleep Matters" providing information to OSA patients regarding their perioperative care. 

Our year might best be described as one of activity concentrated on creation of a framework on which ideas and actions can now grow. With establishment of an efficient administrative structure we can now move from a preoccupation with process to creative roles in promoting education, research and clinical standards. In doing so we seek to broaden our membership and increase its level of engagement with these matters.

In all of this our hard working committees, Board and its executive committee deserves special thanks.

David R Hillman
President