Correspondence Address:
Ahmed A Rabie
King Saud Medical City KSMC, Riyadh

Full Text



Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a life-saving therapy but is labor-intensive, sophisticated, and expensive. It is provided in tertiary care hospitals, which takes exceptional devotion and a disciplined, organized program. In Saudi Arabia, the service is primarily provided by the Ministry of Health MOH; it began in 2002 and was initially limited to a few centers that only provided circulatory support; however, the number of centers and ECMO providers increased to 11 centers in MOH hospitals, in addition to an average of 10 centers in non-MOH hospitals and the private sector.

Since the advent of MESC-CoV endemics in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, ECMO has demonstrated a significant increase in demand and use; it improves survival in a group of severely critically ill patients with refractory hypoxia, with satisfactory outcomes and high standards of service quality across the country, the Saudi ECMO experience is unique and acknowledged through holding a series of specialized conferences each year, conducting research, and presenting at international conferences.

Consequently, we issued this special edition of the Saudi Critical Care Society journal this year, which hosted the SECLS 2023 conference in Jeddah. It contains five original peer-reviewed articles and 17 submitted abstracts from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East; all were blindly (authors and reviewers) evaluated using a rubric score and accepted for an oral and poster presentation.

Acknowledgment

I dedicated this work to the soul of my father. And we would like to express our gratitude to the external reviewers involved in the peer review and abstract evaluation process along with the editorial board, Dr. Ahmed Labib, Dr. Grace Van Leeuwen, Dr. Faisal Rebahi, Dr. Ahmed Mady, DR. Waleed Alatreby, Dr. Zohdy Farea, Dr.Marwa Ead.