Return of the Live Journal Club!

Back by popular demand, live Twitter journal club! But I’ve chosen a new time that should allow a lot more people to participate. Wednesday, November 3 @ 4:00pm Eastern (GMT-5). We’ll be discussing a big new study that has a potential impact on not only how we treat COVID, but possibly ARDS in general.

The COVID Steroid 2 trial compared 2 different dosing strategies for steroids in COVID-19 infection and had some…interesting results. You can get the paper here. We’ll be discussing the trial itself, the findings, and what you think they mean for COVID steroid treatment and if you think this will have any impact on steroids in ARDS or other lung diseases.

So, you’ve got almost a week to read the paper (if you haven’t read it already) and get ready to discuss. Hope you’ll join us on Twitter (@CritCareNotes) on Wednesday, November 4 @ 4:00pm Eastern/GMT -5. See you then!

Online Journal Club

Back in November of 2019 (before COVID, remember those days?), we started an online, virtual journal club on Twitter called TwitticalCare. Every month, a recent article from the critical care literature was posted along with discussion questions during a live session. Lots of people participated and generated some good discussion. the TwitticalCare account went from 0 followers to 1000+ almost overnight. It was hugely popular.

Then, COVID happened. And those of us who were working in ICUs around the world became overwhelmed. The LAST thing any of us wanted to do in the evening after working in the ICU all day was get online and talk about critical care. We wanted to watch cat videos and binge Netflix and basically turn our brains off.

Now, a lot of us are ready to get back to that worldwide virtual discussion. And so, TwitticalCare became Critical Care Notes. The site expanded to include curated content from around the web, but we wanted to keep the Journal Club and bring it back. So, once a month, we’ll share a recent article from the literature and have a discussion. Sometimes it will be asynchronously, allowing people to participate on their own schedule, even if their timezones are far apart. And sometimes we’ll do a live, synchronous session where people can discuss in real time.

Articles will be posted here along with links to the discussion on Twitter. So, come on and join the discussion!

Use of Airway Pressure Release Ventilation in Patients With Acute Respiratory Failure Due to Coronavirus Disease 2019

First journal club in a while, and we’re going to do this one asynchronously. Topic: APRV. This should generate some discussion…

The article can be found here. This paper is open access, but PDF only. So, you’ll need to download the PDF to read. Then, come over to Twitter to jump in the discussion.