Current Issue March 2012 | Vol. 30, No. 1
Current Topic
March 2012
Surgical Palliative Care and Pain ManagementGeoffrey P. Dunn, MD, Guest Editor
Over the last decade, palliative care principles and practices have been increasingly recognized and integrated into the practice and institutions of surgery and anesthesia. During this time, the more general field of palliative care has established itself as a medical subspecialty and has created a high educational standard for itself through the establishment of over sixty fellowship programs and numerous other educational initiatives. Basic research is rapidly proliferating, although still lags in funding appropriate for the potential benefits. Hospital palliative care programs are rapidly proliferating while the National Quality Forum has identified quality indicators and best practices. Despite the recent political setback of the "death panel" characterization of federal funding for the most innocent of all medical interventions, the patient/doctor discussion about end-of-life treatment preferences, favorable public perception of palliative care is increasing, in part, due to the popular writings of surgeons Pauline Chen and Atul Gawande. Palliative care has become a timely lens through which the socioeconomic and spiritual bankruptcy of the current health care system and our prevailing expectations of the health care system are starkly visible especially when it is focused on the hospital care of patients with advanced and critical illness.
December 2011 September 2011 June 2011 March 20112011 - Volume 29
Sedation and Analgesia in the ICU: Pharmacology, Protocolization, and Clinical ConsequencesPratik P. Pandharipande, MD, MSCI, and E. Wesley Ely, MD, MPH, Guest Editors
Information Technology Applied to AnesthesiologySachin Kheterpal, MD, MBA, and Kevin K. Tremper, MD, PhD, Guest Editors
Regional Analgesia and Acute Pain ManagementSugantha Ganapathy, MBBS, DA, FRCA, FFARCS (I), FRCPC, and Vincent Chan, MD, FRCPC, Guest Editors
Quality of Anesthesia CareMark D. Neuman, MD, MSc Elizabeth A. Martinez, MD, MHS, Guest Editors
