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This anonymous author gives their perspective on working with neurodiversity and the importance of building knowledge and raising awareness about neurodiversity in anaesthesia.

The fourth national trainee-led research project of the Research and Audit Federation of Trainees (RAFT) is well into the development stage. We will investigate patient-reported outcomes after day-case surgery, including data on the quality of recovery, pain, and analgesia in the first week after surgery. 

On the 27 August 2011, The Times alerted readers to a craze originating in Spain: a drink high in alcohol was vaporised in a hand-held inhaler that contained a heater and a supply of oxygen.

The Nuffield Department of Anaesthesia in Oxford is the largest clinical department in our trust. We are based across five different sites, with more than 200 anaesthetists. Our department has a strong history of engaging in national projects, including the National Audit Projects (NAPs).

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.