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Meet our new research fellows and find more about them, their work and their interests outside anaesthesia.

3-D printers were once the remit of science fiction but are now relatively cheap, available and simple to use. Dr Gohil and Dr Eleanor Whittingham from Warwick Hospital tell us how they used a 3-D printer to solve a safety issue.

Some are very familiar – a growing, aging population with increasing levels of chronic health problems and significant inequalities in care provision. Others are a factor of the Indian system which Ravi describes as ‘chaotic’.

A key issue underpinning that chaos is the distribution of physicians, 80% of whom practice in urban areas while 70% of the population live rural lives.

Ravi and colleagues are using cutting-edge digital technology to improve healthcare provision in India by introducing ‘comprehensive connected care’. This hub-and-spoke model uses digital connectivity to exchange data and information between centrally located expert clinicians and those caring for patients. For example staff in 5G-enabled ambulances transporting very sick people over long distances receive advice from critical care physicians who have all the patient’s clinical data at their fingertips.

At the recent College Tutors’ Meeting in June, the submissions for the annual poster competition were judged. The three highest-scored abstracts were selected for oral presentation at the meeting. 

• Dr Amrit Dhadda, The Welsh School of Anaesthesia, was awarded first place.
• Dr April Lu, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust and Dr Charindri Wariyapola, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, came in joint second place.

In anaesthesia they have been present for the last 10 years but have become more prevalent in the last four years. Many factors have led to this increase, but one of the biggest is the rise in the number of IMGs as new registrants on the GMC register. These totalled 40% of all new registrants in the last year.¹ Other factors include training bottlenecks that have appeared as an unintended consequence of the changes from the 2010 curriculum.

This has led to increased competition for available posts, with significant numbers of doctors sitting in Locally Employed Doctor or Medical Training Initiative posts accumulating competencies that can count towards CESR. Understandably, trusts that can offer all the components of the curriculum in-house have recognised the potential to have a consistently high-quality, in-house workforce, with an ability to fill their own rotas when gaps appear. This is aided by the Lifelong Learning Platform being freely available to all members of the College, enabling training gaps to be easily identified and targeted with in-house training programmes.

Find out who has newly joined the College.

A warm welcome to our new HRSC fellows.

If there is one thing we have learnt recently, it is to make sure we engage with you, our members. We need your valuable experience and views to shape the future of the College.

How the College is run for patients, and on behalf of its members

You may remember that back in February we took a single proposal regarding governance of the College to an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM), asking members to back a package of measures to change the governance of the College and bring us in line with the laws which govern us in our legal status as a charity.

This proposal, while receiving the majority of votes, did not get the support of the two-thirds of attendees needed to pass it. Listening to feedback after the event, we learnt that members had not felt sufficiently involved in the drawing-up of proposals and that including all the proposals in a single vote was complicated.

At the time of writing this article we can be fairly confident that we have left the worst of the pandemic behind us. However, the NHS now faces the challenge of tackling spiralling waiting times for elective surgery. Now, more than ever, it is critical that patients (especially the most complex cases) receive, wherever possible, a comprehensive preoperative assessment.

This should include information to help them prepare for their procedure, understand the risks and, through shared decision-making discussions with their healthcare team, achieve the best possible outcomes.

Despite the disruption caused by the pandemic, the College’s Patient Information Group has continued to update existing resources and produce new ones to support patients and NHS colleagues through this difficult time. We remain committed to providing evidence-based, high-quality patient information resources, and we are delighted that we have been recertified through the Patient Information Forum Trusted Information Creator Kitemark (PIF TICK) for the third year in a row.