AUA: An Academic Anesthesiology Organization Learning to Grow and Growing to Learn

embers of the Association of UniversityAnesthesiologists (AUA) will participate in the 2006 AUA Annual Meeting in Tucson, Arizona, from May 11-13. The meeting’s host is the University of Arizona Department of Anesthesiology. Steven J. Barker, M.D., Ph.D., and his faculty have created a wonderful mixture of science and local interests to stimulate discussions and fellowship for the members during the meeting.

This meeting remains one of the true highlights of the academic year, and I have been honored to serve as AUA president over the last two years. One of our primary goals of these last two years has been to make the election of AUA members more objective, and with the leadership of Immediate Past President Donald S. Prough, M.D., on this issue, I believe the AUA Council and its members are well-served with the new, more explicit criteria for member election. These criteria can found on the AUA Web site at <www.auahq.org> and also are outlined in the Winter 2005 AUA Update, the Society’s quarterly newsletter. It is my belief that academic anesthesiology needs a larger number of young and energetic faculty seeking to advance the specialty, and AUA serves as an excellent catalyst for these needed advances. During 2005, AUA elected to membership the largest number of new members in the history of the organization, and we are hopeful that this trend will continue in 2006.

It is my sincere hope that the faculty mentoring presentation provided in the 2006 President’s Panel at our Annual Meeting will stimulate many departments across the country to seek to understand how best to nurture faculty interests in academics, both in short-term and, more importantly, over an entire career. Though remaining speculative at this point, data suggest that the presence of fellows in a department stimulates both frequency of faculty publications and National Institutes of Health award totals. We need to better understand the survey data that led to recognition of these associations. The survey was carried out specifically to create a baseline for our discussion on mentoring at this year’s AUA Annual Meeting. Probably as important to me in developing the survey was the response rate for our academic departments: of 127 letters sent requesting survey completion, only 39 percent of our academic departments responded. Though acceptable for most surveys, this rate of return does shed some light on the challenges we face as a group focused on improving academic anesthesiology practice.

We also heard about the 2007 AUA Annual Meeting in Chicago at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers. Jeffrey L. Apfelbaum, M.D., and colleagues at University of Chicago are busily planning for a welcoming and interesting meeting in one of our members’ favorite cities on April 26-28, 2007.

With my last year as AUA President behind me, I have great confidence that Roberta L. Hines, M.D., and the AUA Council will continue to push in all the right places to create a vision and develop plans to move academic anesthesiology forward during the later half of this decade. Finally, all of us on the AUA Council want to thank Nicole C. Bradle for the wonderful administrative support she provides for AUA. Without her attention to detail, our work would be much more difficult.

David L. Brown, M.D., is Edward Rotan Distinguished Professor and Chair, Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas.