Education Committee Update:
IARS/SOCCA Annual Meeting Critical Care Track

by Kunal Karamchandani, MD, FCCM
Chair, SOCCA Education Committee
UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX

Anna Budde MD
Vice Chair, SOCCA Education Committee 
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

Volume 36 | Issue 4 | Dec 2025

On behalf of the SOCCA Education Committee, we wish everyone a very joyous festival season. As we head into the New Year, the Education Committee remains committed to enhancing the educational experience for SOCCA members through its various offerings. In addition to our conventional offerings, the committee is working on creating additional educational content for SOCCA members in the upcoming year. The Education Committee offerings include: Board Review Course, Annual Meeting, Educational webinar, Virtual education, Journal Club, and Question bank subcommittees.

The most active subcommittee this year has been the Board Review Course subcommittee, chaired by Dr. Talia Ben-Jacob, with Dr. Veena Satyapriya as the vice chair. The subcommittee conducted the SOCCA 2025 Board Review Course (BRC), which had all new content, and was held in the fall, prior to the critical care board exam with four sessions of 2 hours each. This was a hybrid SOCCA BRC wherein some of the talks were pre-recorded, but the speakers were present live to answer any questions that the audience had. The course covered some of the frequently missed topics from prior exams and other high yield, frequently tested content. It was exclusively taught by SOCCA Member faculty and moderated by the members of the BRC subcommittee. The sessions were recorded, and made available to the registrants after all four sessions were conducted. Kudos to the BRC subcommittee leadership and the members, who worked tirelessly to make this event a resounding success with over 140 registrants. A big thank you to the speakers for their commitment and dedication in helping with this endeavor.

The Annual Meeting subcommittee, chaired by Dr. Kunal Karamchandani, and co-vice chaired by Drs. Ioannis (Yanni) Angelidis, and Jennifer Elia, MD, was tasked with grading the various session and workshop proposals submitted under the Critical Care track for the SOCCA/IARS Annual Meeting. This year the Critical Care track received the most session proposals amongst all the tracks, and the subcommittee members had a tough task, choosing the best proposals to be included in the Annual Meeting program. The proposals that were highly rated, but could not be accommodated, were then sent to the Webinar subcommittee to be considered for the SOCCA Educational Webinar series for 2026.

The Webinar subcommittee, chaired by Dr. Amit Prabhakar, with Dr. Javier Lorenzo, as the vice chair, has been instrumental in bringing the highest quality educational webinars to our members throughout the year. The subcommittee is in the process of planning the Webinar series for next year, and we look forward to some great educational content for the 2026 Webinar series as well. The Virtual education subcommittee is headed by Dr. Anna Budde and has been working closely with the IARS Open Anesthesia platform, curating critical care related content for them. They continue to publish new summaries on Open Anesthesia, with the goal of providing a comprehensive repository of critical care topics that would be helpful for medical students, and residents on their ICU rotation. The next step is to collaborate with the Journal Club subcommittee and publish a high yield summary of the important articles that are being discussed during the Virtual journal club sessions on the Open Anesthesia platform.

The Journal Club subcommittee, chaired by Dr. Alok Kacha, has been conducting virtual sessions, giving an opportunity to the critical care fellows to present interesting and landmark studies. These Journal Club sessions are moderated by experienced Critical Care Anesthesiologists, and the purpose of these sessions is to critique and comprehensively evaluate each of the studies, thus informing the audience of the key take-aways while also understanding their limitations. The Question Bank subcommittee, which is relatively new, and chaired by Dr. Emily Naoum, with Dr. Hesham Ezz as the vice chair, is in the process of creating a virtual Question Bank, that could be an invaluable resource for the ACCM fellows and junior faculty that are preparing for their Critical Care board exams.

The Education committee update would be incomplete without recognizing Ms. Jennifer Rzepka and her team for all the hard work that they put in. We are hugely appreciative of all the behind-the-scenes work they do with the creation, promotion and dissemination of educational content to SOCCA members.