Associate Editor’s Message

Medicine is a field of life-long learning—and perhaps nowhere is it better illustrated on a minute-by-minute basis than in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit. What we know (and don’t know) is always changing. Fortunately, in this fast-paced world, who AND how we can ask for guidance and help is only growing.

In the early days of COVID-19, many of us (perhaps all) were on at least one Whatsapp group with providers across the world who were sharing what they were seeing, the thrombotic issues, the inflammatory storm we came to know as MIS-C, etc. We are constantly on the lookout for what is working for other centers for pain-points such as central-line associated infections or inpatient developmental care. And collaborative learning showed us newer best practices in cardiac arrest prevention and ventricular assist device anticoagulation—and is helping our field study new technologies and compare surgical and catheter-based strategies in prospective studies. Needless to say, no matter what niche we work in, learning and improving together is taking us farther, faster, and more effectively, than ever before.

And what better way to celebrate this power of collaboration and multi-disciplinary learning than the 8^th World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery, coming up in August 2023! The “Olympics” of our field indeed, this year’s extravaganza promises to be an event monumental in its scope for collaboration, networking, multidisciplinary learning, and breaking down silos to learn about and share advances in the care of children with heart disease who we are all passionate about. To help get you excited, in this edition of the newsletter, we chose to highlight a few of the key intersections between the field of cardiac intensive care and PCICS and the worlds of neurodevelopmental outcomes, cardiac catheterization, and collaborative learning networks.

With that in mind, we invited a variety of authors representing diverse centers and networks, to showcase the scope of collaboration between cardiac critical care and other arenas, joint sessions/activities coming up in the World Congress that they are (and that we should!) get excited about, and avenues for working together in the future. This is not an exhaustive list, rather just a flavor, to draw attention to all the ways everything we do in the cardiac ICU interlinks with the rest of the complex care our patients receive, and how in this world of growing sub-sub-sub-specializations, the benefits of working together with different people have never been more evident.

Happy reading, and see you all in Washington, D.C.!