Message from the Chair

Over the past three years amazing changes have been made that are helping us build a nationally prominent department with excellence in clinical care, education, research, as well as fiscal responsibility.

There is a strong emphasis on creating and living a culture of respect, transparency, and teamwork. At this time I would like to share some highlights of these important changes.

Clinically, our focus on quality of care and safety has resulted in significant recognition from The Joint Commission and CMS, including a clean bill of health and approval for the changes instituted by the department. Further evidence for our focus on quality of care is the recent appointment of Dr. Shermeen Vakharia as Vice Chair for Quality and Patient Safety. Our Operation Officers, lead by Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs Dr. Scott Engwall, are doing a spectacular job as evidenced by a 92% first case on-time start rates and a number of ongoing Lean Sigma initiatives. Pain management has a newly developed regional anesthesia and acute pain service, and the chronic pain service has newly renovated space in Gottschalk Medical Plaza.

A real highlight was receiving a 5-year accreditation for our residency program and ACGME approval to move from the traditional 3-year residency program to a 4-year program. Our curriculum now includes an ethics and professionalism series, Grand Rounds with monthly nationally and internationally recognized speakers, multiple workshops, and the newly established Simulation Center. The Simulation Center has a full-scale operating room, emergency room/trauma bay, obstetrical operating room suite, clinical ward and critical care unit for training. The simulated operating room is fully equipped and realistic with all standard medical gases, an anesthetic scavenging system, a new GE Aisys anesthesia machine with Navigator Applications Suite, and the latest airway equipment and OR design. Simulation is a major strength in our department due to the hard work of an outstanding team headed by the Simulation Operations Director Cecilia Canales, MPH.

An extensive recruitment and reorganization of research activities has taken place since 2008 and is now ongoing to strengthen research in basic, clinical, and educational domains. Several strong basic and clinical research faculty recruitments from top programs have successful brought new research talent to the department including Maxime Cannesson, M.D., Ph.D., in 2009, who has developed an internationally recognized program in perioperative technology with extensive collaborations with bio-engineers, industry, and international colleagues, and Leif Havton, M.D., Ph.D., in 2010, who joined the department from UCLA as Professor and Vice Chair of Research. The department’s research program is now experiencing an accelerated growth with an active search for additional senior faculty members in pain research ongoing.

These are exciting times in the Department of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Care at UC Irvine, we have under gone an amazing transformation, a renaissance.

Sincerely,

Zeev N. Kain, MD, MBA
Chair, Department of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Care
Associate Dean for Clinical Operations