Advocacy for the specialty and the safety of our patients remains one of the highest priorities of ASA. The Daily News asked meeting attendees how important advocacy was to them.

That quote in the headline is the assessment of ASA First Vice President Jeffrey S. Plagenhoef, M.D., as he urged all ASA members to submit their comments in support of the nation’s Veterans, whose care is being threatened by the coming VHA Nursing Handbook.

Anesthesia, and every physician anesthesiologist, needs the right balance of science and compassion. It is not enough to be a great scientist or a great humanitarian to provide good care; one must integrate elements of both.

For the 15th consecutive year, the annual meeting featured an acupuncture workshop to introduce physician anesthesiologists to treatments once scoffed at by Western physicians but that are now becoming mainstream.

Monitored anesthesia care is an everyday affair at many hospitals. But when sedation is needed to place electrodes for deep brain stimulation (DBS), the case can become more complicated.

More than 1 million falls occur in hospitals each year, with as many as half resulting in at least minor injury and up to 10 percent resulting in major injury. A session Monday looked at whether many of those are preventable.

Learn about using large secondary data sets for health services research that could affect health policy and the delivery of care by attending “Aiming for a More Evidence-Based Approach to Medical Practice — How to Get There Using Secondary Data for Outcomes Research” from 10 a.m. to noon tomorrow in Upper 24A-C.

Physician anesthesiologists don’t always control the patient’s depth of anesthesia when using inhaled drugs as effectively as they would like to. Practitioners may be familiar with drug kinetics, but end-tidal concentrations can vary based on encumbrance of low fresh gas flow and failing to observe graphic trends of concentration.

In the last decade, several anesthesia emergency manuals have been developed for improving actions during critical events, and simulation-based studies have shown their effectiveness. You can learn more about the availability of manuals and data about their successful implementation during two sessions Tuesday.