Neuro-Intensive Care & Emergency Medicine (NICEM)

Aims and Missions

The Section on Neuro-Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine encourages and supports research, training and the scientific content of the annual congress in the areas of Neurological Intensive care, trauma and emergency medicine.

Chair and deputy

Chair Giuseppe Citerio - Monza, Italy

Deputy Pedro Navarrete - Granada, Spain

Membership

There are currently 151 voting members and 1684 registered members. Please note that only the voting members of the Section may elect the chair and the deputy.

Do you wish to be one of the members of this Section or do you wish to change your Section registration? Please send an email at public@esicm.org.

Activities

The mission of this Section is to improve outcomes for patients with life-threatening neurological illnesses. In particular, our mission is to promote:

Professional Collaboration by providing a forum for communication, collaboration, and exchange of ideas between physicians and allied health-care professionals within different specialties who care for critically ill neurological patients.
Research by fostering experimental, clinical, and outcomes research focused on developing medical and surgical interventions for acute neurological disorders.
Training and Education by developing standards for training and physician competencies in the subspecialty of neurological intensive care.
Advocacy by making the case to patients, the public, policy makers and other health-care professionals that complex, life-threatening neurological diseases are best cared for by a multidisciplinary team with specialised expertise in neurological critical care.

To achieve these aims, the Neurological Intensive Care & Emergency Medicine Section developed post-graduate courses on neurological intensive care, traumatic and non traumatic. The aim of this courses ahs been to provide theoretical background for the basis of neuro-intensive care and then practise points to allow them to deliver high quality neurological intensive care.

In summer 2010, in collaboration with SCCM and the Irish Society of Intensive Care, will be held the 9th Summer Conference (Dublin Castle, Ireland, 10-12 June 2010). The topic this year will be Acute Brain Injury, traumatic and vascular. Moreover, new hints on consciousness disordes and related topic will be presente. The purpose of this Summer conference is to provide an educational experience on issues related to disease management. The meeting is a mixture of state of the art lectures and informal interactive workshops, which aims to provide an environment that is both enjoyable and conducive to learning.

In addition to this important development, members of the Section recently published a consensus document on neuromonitoring (Andrews PJ, Citerio G, Longhi L, Polderman K, Sahuquillo J, Vajkoczy P; Neuro-Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (NICEM) Section of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine. NICEM consensus on neurological monitoring in acute neurological disease. Intensive Care Med. 2008 Aug;34(8):1362-70).

It is apparent that in many European countries, and throughout the rest of the world, there is a need to consider and standardise the care of these vulnerable patients. We plan to collaborate with the Neuro-Intensive Care Society in the United States on this venture.

Finally, a number of potential research projects have been suggested from Section members and non-members involving neurological intensive care. In order to take this concept further, the ESICM started a project to identify and prioritize the major research questions of interest to our members. Consequently a survey was sent by email (and complemented by a questionnaire posted on the ESICM’s Website) to all of its members. This questionnaire was available to all registered members from the 15^th of December 2006 to the end of January 2007. During the study period, 358 members filled-in the questionnaire.

One of top question for Clinical Relevance on Scientific Relevance was on ICP monitoring and therapy. Therefore the section, chaired at that time by Peter Andrews, developed the "European Society of Intensive Care Medicine study of therapeutic hypothermia (32-35°C) after traumatic brain injury. Study Acronym: Eurotherm3235trial”. The trial is aimed to evaluate if therapeutic hypothermia (32-35° C) reduces death and disability after intracranial hypertension due to traumatic brain injury.

All the society members are invited to require information on the trial visiting the website http://www.eurotherm3235trial.eu/ or contacting Peter Andrews (Principal Investigator, pandrews@ed.ac.uk) or Louise Sinclair (l.sinclair@ed.ac.uk).

Meetings agenda and minutes

On October 13th, the section meet at 7.30 am in the Vienna Congress Centre. The idea of having such an early morning meeting was due to the consideration of avoiding the overlap with other congress activities. There were present not many members. Some participants reported difficulties receiving email from the office and from the section.

ACTION POINTS:

Better comunication trought the ESICM office
Direct contact with me, if you do not receive messages
More information (also from you) to the interested colleagues for promoting the section activities and on the need of a more active participation.

We discuss the message sent to the section on June about the abstract submitted at VI09 meeting. The concern about the "quality" of the presented abstracts has been extensively discussed.

ACTION POINTS:

A message to all colleagues interested in NICEM topics to submit their reasearch activities at this meeting (instead to others) has been stressed.

We presented also the results of web-based poll on topics and speakers for the next annual meeting (Barcelona 10-13 October 2010. The preferred topics were:

An area of opposed thinking: sedation management
CPP / ICP / State of the Art 2010
Cerebral “autoregulation” in neurointensive care
Vasospasm
Coagulation problem in NICU

We were not satisfied about the proposal received so far. There is too much overlap with the previous congresses topics and the proposed sessions are not “exciting”. We stressed the need of:
- New ideas on topic not presented in the previous ESICM congress.
- Keep some educational presentations (very attended today)
- Insert more emergency medicine topics in the program.

ACTION POINTS:

Send to me proposal for interesting session considering that new topics have to be explored.

Dublin 2010 Summer Conference. The program discussed and finalized in the last months with the SCCM and the Irish National Society has been presented in detalis.
PACT neuromodules. We need voluntairs for reviewing the Neuro modules. Please send me your candidature, if available.

Postoperative Delirium collaboration. We are collaborating the Post-operative section in a working group on post-op delirium. If you are interested, please contact me.

A short report from the research committee, the congress committee and from the
council was presented by the Deputy, Pedro Navarrete, and by me.

Please, send proposal for future activities, suggestions, comments. I believe that the section activity isn’t only focused on the congress program preparation.