Blogs

Dear AARC Neonatal Pediatric Section Members,

As of Tuesday, December 7, 2010 at the AARC Annual business meeting, I became your chair for the Neo-Peds section for the next 2 years. I am very excited to represent you, and look forward to getting to know many of you better and more personally over the next two years. These are exciting times for both the section, and the Respiratory Care profession.  As of today, we have 1,997 section members.  This count is up 500 members over the last 3 years or so. As a whole, AARC membership just hit the 50,000 mark this year.

For those of you who are just back from attending the AARC International Congress in Las Vegas Nevada, it was another rejuvenating and exciting meeting.   Congratulations to Lee Williford, RRT, for receiving the 2010 Neonatal Pediatric Specialty Practitioner of the year award for the section!  Lee was nominated by his colleagues at Duke University and several physicians' for this prestigious award.  He represents the well respected and highly relied on pediatric RRT in his institution!

Many neo/peds focused lectures were provided by physicians at various children's hospitals around the country as well as several of our RRT's within the AARC neonatal community.  Two open forums on Wednesday and Thursday were dedicated solely to Neonatal pediatric focused research, and topics.  In addition, there were neonatal/pediatric RT's and focused posters spread throughout all the other open forums. It is exciting to see us rising in the arena of research, and evidence based knowledge, we have come so far!  My goal for the section over the next two years is that we try to take the neo/peds open forums to the next level.  This means all of us need to work hard to learn as much as we can from mentors in the field to make our research, and improvement projects more scientific.  I challenge you all to find ways to do this!  This will allow us to improve our knowledge of pediatric respiratory care and better help our small patients who are in much need of our knowledge and expertise!  The deadline for next year's open forum is June 1, 2011.  Remember, it is never too early to start thinking of ideas and working on projects to submit.  We should also try to submit more of our abstracts as manuscripts so that are hard work is actually published.  This should be the end goal of all abstracts we submit.  It may take hard work to accomplish this, but with dedication we can persevere in this arena.

In addition to the open forum deadline, we have a very pressing deadline of January 5, 2011 to submit lectures/symposia for the 57^th AARC International conference in Tampa, Florida.  The conference dates for next year will be November 5^th-8^th, 2011.  You can submit your lecture topics and speakers via the Easy Street link on the main page of the website atwww.aarc.org.   Please remember to ask a speaker first if they are willing, and able to do the lecture at the conference prior to submitting their name.  

Last but not least, I have selected two new editors who will be helping me with the bulletin this year.  Jenni Raake, MBA, RRT-NPS is the Clinical Manager of the CICU at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and Natalie Napolitano, MPH, RRT-NPS, AE-C is Respiratory Therapist Inova Fairfax Hospital in Fairfax, VA.  Please contact us through the form on the website if you would like to contribute an article to the bulletin for 2011.  Our quarterly deadlines for this year are January 1, April 1, July 1, and October 1, 2011. I would like to get contributions from as many hospitals as possible.  It is a great way to highlight your institution and practice with other pediatric RT's around the country.

Please do not hesitate to email me @cynthia.white@cchmc.org  or through AARC connect is there is anything I can help you with, or if you have ideas for new ways we can improve the list serve, website, or facilitate moving the section forward.  I am very excited to work with you all over the next two years.  Also, feel free to contact me with the proposal ideas for the 2011 congress so that I am able to support them.

Best Regards and Happy New Year,