Abstract
Reflecting on the past year, my second in the role of Editor in Chief, brings a feeling of happiness unmatched by many other parts of a modern clinical academic life. This aspect of my job brings me in to contact with people eager to communicate their thoughts, ideas and discoveries to the world. The enthusiasm and energy of these individuals are infectious. It needs to be bottled up and distributed liberally to the army of naysayers that dominates the landscape; bringing hope to the world as the Beatles did with their music; facing down the dastardly Blue Meanies in the ‘Yellow Submarine’. The willingness of people to investigate and communicate through this journal is responsible for its remarkable growth over the years. For a journal that started from such humble beginnings, each year I am increasingly proud of what we are able to produce. All content comes from our readers and interested authors around the world, with an enormous amount of hard work behind the scenes by our Editors to assess and shape the articles that make this journal.
This year we plan to replace the case report section (so may I please ask you to stop submitting case reports!) with a section focused on common problems faced on the intensive care unit and how to approach them. Deliberately geared towards exam questions, this section will be overseen by a new Associate Editor and is designed to be both evidence-based and practical. Details of how to submit cases to this section will be forthcoming.
As the quality of articles advances with every edition, it becomes harder to choose which to highlight as particularly worthy of your notice. In this edition, I’d like to draw your attention to the Special Article written by Andrew Chadwick and Rosie Baruah, ‘Gender disparity and implicit gender bias amongst doctors in Intensive Care Medicine: A “disease” we need to recognise and treat.’ By using language usually reserved for disease classification, the authors explain adroitly how unconscious gender bias promulgates gender disparity. Focusing on intensive care medicine, they invite us to consider the symptoms, signs and pathophysiology of this ‘disease’ that infects our speciality, before tackling how this complex and pervasive problem may be treated. This particular malady may appear to be as refractory to treatment as the many forms of critical illness that we battle against every day, for our patients, but here we are offered an opportunity to perceive gender bias as disease that affects us all, and which requires our commitment to be eradicated forever.