So, SMACC (Social Media And Critical Care) was great. This is the third year that this tribe-inclusive, hierarchy-leveling conference has been run. The first two were in Australia (Sydney in 2013 and the Gold Coast in 2014) and this year SMACC crossed the Pacific to the McCormick Place Convention Centre in Chicago.

If you went, then you'll know what I'm talking about and you are probably just coming down off the high. If not, well, you missed out. There was content for the pre-hospitalists, emergency, intensive care, anaesthesia and rural practicioners. There were doctors, nurses, paramedics, medical students, astrophysicists and near nudity.

But don't despair. You can still get a look in. All of the main conference talks were recorded and will be released over the coming months on the SMACC website (smacc.net.au), as well as the affiliated sites, such as the Intensive Care Network. The talks were really high quality, so I really recommend that you watch them as they come out.

Everyone will have their favourites and standouts for me were
- Ashley Leibig's preconference workshop talk on dealing with the trauma of what we do, using some tough cases she managed as an Airborne Division medic.
- Tim Leeuwenberg's talk "All alone on Kangaroo Island" which dealt with isolation and vulnerability
- Kevin Fong's "Safety lessons from space"
- David Newman's irreverent but brilliant "Dogmalysis and Pseudoaxioms"
- Anything by John Hinds (God rest his soul - Go and support the drive for HEMS_NI)

The SMACC Chicago program is here for a little longer, so download it and keep an eye out for your favourite topics.

I went to the smaccFORCE pre-hospital workshop the day before the main conference and I've loaded up my notes from it as a pdf here - smaccFORCE notes.

The workshop was excellent and included Mike Lauria discussing how to use cognitive strategies to maximise effectiveness with minimal bandwidth and a fully simulated primary retrieval scenario. You can listen to a podcast that I previously recorded with Mike here - "Decision making in high stakes environments".

I also had the chance to help out with the SMACC Cadaver Lab, organised and run by Dr Chris Ross, where we took delegates through procedures including intraosseus access, tube thoracostomy, lateral canthotomy, pericardial drainage and joint centesis.

And of course, there was the social side, which after three years pleasantly meant catching up with a lot of friends as well as meeting new ones.