Zoom On: Sharon Einav, ICM Subcommittee, European Society of Anaesthesiology

Sharon Einav, MSc, MD has chaired the subcommittee for Intensive Care Medicine at the European Society of Anaesthesiology since January 2014. She is Professor of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine, Director of Surgical Intensive Care and Chair of the Resuscitation Committee at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel. Prof. Einav is President of the Israel Society of Resuscitation, the Israel country representative for the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, and is a member of the Steering Committee, Disaster Response Network, American College of Chest Physicians

1. What are your key areas of interest and research?
Mostly quality of care and outcomes of cardiopulmonary resuscitation and maternal critical illness.

2. What are the major challenges in your field?

• In resuscitation - the need to reconcile some of the outcomes we achieve with our personal preferences in terms of quality of life. This is an ethical rather than a medical issue but it often leaves one with a sense that there is still much to be done to improve.   
• Regarding maternal critical illness – I would say recognition that this is a field that needs to be researched. Pregnant women have been excluded from clinical trials for so long that we are lagging decades behind other cohorts in terms of data.  
  

3. What is your top management tip?

• Encourage people to do what they do best when such opportunity arises.
• Success begets the strength to withstand failure.  

4. What would you single out as a career highlight?
I have been involved in writing several guideline papers (Jeejeebhoy  et al. 2015; King et al. 2014). It is a great privilege to know that one has had such opportunities to make a real impact on clinical practice.    

5. If you had not chosen this career path you would have become a…?
Writer of fiction books for children. There are no limits to human imagination and no imagination is more unbound than that of a child.  

6. What are your personal interests outside of work?
I dance Flamenco 2-3 times a week and read almost anything I can get my hands on.  As a hobby I am also a mother of 3 daughters and am happily married to my husband 25 years.

7. Your favourite quote?
" Deus ex Machina".  It means that things/situations that seem to have no solution at this moment in time, may be resolved by a moment of inspiration or by a new turn of events.