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Chatting in a pub in York in 2019, Simon Davies, David Yates and Gerard Danjoux were reflecting on their academic careers to date. The three colleagues from York and South Tees Hospitals had worked together successfully since 2012, securing prestigious grant funding and delivering high-quality academic studies. Yet something was missing – strategy and infrastructure to create a sustainable programme of work and develop the researchers of the future.

Prehabilitation is a collection of methods that aims to improve outcomes in surgery by optimising the patient’s condition prior to their operation. Increasing surgical wait time has led to calls for a change in the perception of waiting lists to seeing them as ‘preparation lists’. Preparation is multifactorial, and one aspect of it is psychological prehabilitation.

Let’s consider some real patients who were invited to prehabilitation (‘prehab’) clinic for colorectal cancer surgery (names anonymised).

"When I was first asked by the College to write a short article on the talk I had given earlier in the year on the history of medicine, I was initially hesitant for the simple reason that the subject was so vast to do justice to, and moreover that it had to be accessible to everyone."

‘Her death was wholly avoidable and was contributed to in major part by neglect.’ This was the conclusion of the coroner examining the death of Mrs Glenda Logsdail following her death from hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy after an unrecognised oesophageal intubation.

The pandemic has generated a staggering backlog, with more than 7 million patients waiting for care. In order to treat these patients in a timely way, we need to increase our work rate beyond pre-pandemic levels but with our current workforce and model of care, this will be difficult. 

Member service is the focus of the first year of our Five-Year Commitment. We want to provide the right services to you at all stages of your career and deliver a programme of improvement so that your experience of the College is the best it can be.

A new year signals a new Editor for the Bulletin, and it gives me immense pleasure to welcome you to the January 2023 edition. As I write this, the UK’s NHS is experiencing winter pressures, nurse strike action seems imminent, purple seems the new black in terms of hospital bed status, and elective surgical recovery targets seem an insurmountable challenge.

Dear Editor,

Assisted dying – the other side (RCoA Bulletin 134, October 2022)

Dennis has an anaesthetic is an online Beano comic strip, developed by the RCoA in partnership with the Association of Paediatric Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland. Having surgery can be a worrying time for both children and parents and the comic strip aims to add an element of fun and play, while helping children understand what it’s like to have a general anaesthetic and how they can prepare for an operation.