Dr Ruth Bennet and Dr Eimear McClenaghan share their experiences of finding out they were dyslexic as adults in the hope it might help others in similar positions.
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This milestone anniversary allows us to look back and see what the scheme has achieved, as well as what there's still to do.
Differential attainment is a gap in attainment between two groups of people with differing characteristics in one or more areas. This article looks at how and why attainment can be affected in examinations.
This article explores how anaesthetists in training can ensure the successful completion of their Annual Review of Competency Progression.
Every year, anaesthetists in training (AiTs) undergo an Annual Review of Competency Progression (ARCP). ARCPs are a legal requirement and ensure that doctors are providing safe and high-quality patient care. They are used to assess progression against curriculum standards and provide evidence for General Medical Council (GMC) revalidation that happens every five years.
For AiTs, the ARCP panel reviews evidence submitted as part of the Educational Supervisors Structured Report (ESSR) on the Lifelong Learning Platform (LLP). The ESSR contains 16 sections and is the only thing visible to the ARCP panel, so it needs to be complete with all information required to ‘pass’ the ARCP!
Fortunately, the College has produced an in-depth checklist that outlines the requirements for a successful ARCP. This document clearly states what is required in each of the 16 sections for an Outcome 1 at ARCP. The ESSR itself must be created on the LLP after submission of all the prerequisite forms for all forms to pull through.
Dr Sarah Thornton, RCoA Council Member gives us an overview of the rise of CESR programmes in anaesthesia and explains why they're here to stay.
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.
Read the latest letters submitted by members in April's Digital Bulletin.
Read the latest letters submitted by members in April's Digital Bulletin.
Dr Richard Knight provides a gripping first-hand account of military surgical facilities during the Falklands War..."The doctrine under which the unit had trained was essentially the same as was used during the Second World War: treat a wound, evacuate and repeat to a major facility. The Falklands were 8,000 miles from any tertiary facility. Helicopter evacuation at night, when most battles took place, was extremely difficult."
Author: Dr Richard Knight, Retired Anaesthetist, archives@rcoa.ac.uk
In April 1982, I was grinding through a locum session in a Swedish regional hospital when my wife telephoned me to tell me that the duty officer in my UK medical unit has asked her to say a single word to me – the super-secret word designating the necessity to report immediately to the unit.
This was my initiation into Mrs Thatcher's plan to recapture the Falkland Islands.
Most men in the unit knew where Argentina could be found in an atlas, mainly because of the forthcoming football tournament starring Maradona. This had not been the situation when Dr David Owen as Foreign Secretary, had put the unit on stand-by to repel invading Guatemalans from entering British Honduras. Then, the staff sergeant was compelled to send his wife to the NAAFI to buy an atlas.
After days of packing and repacking equipment, the unit was trucked to Southampton to join 2 Para on board a North Sea car ferry. Cabins were allocated, in the best military tradition, by rank, but in reality were all the same tiered bunks. The major in the overhead bunk was to read and reread his copy of Herodotus, in Greek.
Jono Brüün, RCoA Chief Executive Officer, looks at how the College is moving forward at pace as we work to implement improvements to our member services and benefits.
The College is moving forward at pace as we work to implement improvements to our member services and benefits. On the staff team we are all too aware of the challenges you are facing at work, and our goal is to meet your professional needs and to support you in delivering safe and effective patient-centred care.
In her President’s View, Dr Fiona Donald outlines our programme of development for exams, including how we will give anaesthetists in training a greater role in our assessment processes. This has been a major priority for us over the last 18 months as we have sought to investigate how we can make improvements across all aspects of our exams. To help us deliver these improvements we are increasing capacity within our exams team. This additional expertise will enable careful implementation of longer-term changes alongside the regular face-to-face and online delivery of our exams.
Dr Viola Mendonca and Dr Emma Smith look at the effectiveness of medical students in recognising cardiac arrest, initiating chest compressions, and delivering defibrillation.
Dr Viola Mendonca and Dr Emma Smith look at the effectiveness of medical students in recognising cardiac arrest, initiating chest compressions, and delivering defibrillation.
The annual incidence of in-hospital cardiac arrest is 1 to 1.5 per 1,000 hospital admissions, and return of spontaneous circulation is achieved in 53% of those who are treated by a hospital’s resuscitation team.
The hospital resuscitation team must, at a minimum, be able to perform basic airway interventions, including the use of a supraglottic airway in adults, intravenous cannulation, intraosseous access, defibrillation, and drug administration. They also should be able to provide immediate post-resuscitation care. In some hospitals, the cardiac-arrest team may not include an anaesthetist, but advanced airway skills such as tracheal intubation should be accessible when needed.
Dr Kemp and Dr Dore, creators of NovPod tell us how they developed the successful series and what they've learnt along the way.
Authors:
- Dr Duncan Kemp, Anaesthetic Registrar and co-creator of the NovPod
- Dr Eoin Dore, Anaesthetic Registrar and co-creator of the NovPod
This month marks a year of hard work coming to fruition since we launched the podcast ‘NovPod: A beginner’s guide to anaesthetics’. With more than 25,000 ‘listens’ in the first three months, it feels like we’ve created a practical, useful podcast that has been well-received. So to celebrate, we’d like to take you behind the scenes to talk through how we developed the NovPod and discuss some lessons learnt along the way.
From the beginning: why did we do it?
After creating a one-off podcast for a Difficult Airway Society multimedia competition, we wanted to build on this. Our plans coincided with the renovation of the RCoA novice curriculum and so our target audience became obvious – novice anaesthetists. We reflected on our own experiences and set out to share some of the best advice we received as novices. This wasn’t from textbooks or courses, but rather the voices of the friendly registrars and SHOs who would take us aside and tell us how anaesthetics worked in practice – giving us advice and survival tips to help us grow and develop.