The moral and social imperative to diminish pain, alleviate anxiety, and optimize patient comfort during medical, dental, and surgical procedures has led to the worldwide practice of procedural sedation and analgesia. Practitioners of different backgrounds, training, and skill sets administer such sedation in diverse settings, and accordingly this multidisciplinary field has long been subject to interspecialty debate and discord.
Founded in 2015, the mission of the International Committee for the Advancement of Procedural Sedation (ICAPS) is to provide an independent, international, multidisciplinary forum to facilitate open dialogue and consensus generation between experts in the area of sedation, and to promote optimal, evidence-based, safe and effective practices for worldwide procedural sedation and analgesia in patients of all ages.
Photos courtesy of Larry B. Mellick, MD, Professor Marie T. Hosey, Adobe Stock and Baruch S. Krauss, MD (left to right), respectively. Used with permission.