Dr Richard Knight looks back at the turbulent 1970s – a decade well known as a time of crisis both economically and politically.
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Dr Claire Shannon, President outlines what's coming up in 2025 and why it's important to support each other and work as part of a great team.
Dr Claire Shannon, President outlines what's coming up in 2025 and why it's important to support each other and work as part of a great team.
Happy New Year to you all. I know many of you will have been working over the festive period, but I hope you also had some time to catch up with friends and family and take a well-earned break.
Winter is never an easy time in the NHS. During the more challenging times of the year, I’m always particularly grateful for the support of my colleagues and the benefits of working as part of a great team. I hope that’s true for you too as we look to the year ahead.
Jono Brüün shares the College's current financial position and outlines the depth of care and consideration taken by trustees and staff in the stewardship of the College’s assets, as we seek to make them work harder and smarter for you.
Dr Shepherd and Professor Krige produce resources to support you if you encounter a patient living with ME/CFS.
Over the years both the College and the ME Association have been receiving a number of enquiries from patients living with ME/CFS bemoaning the lack of information on how anaesthesia might affect their condition, but also seeking reassurances that their needs in the perioperative period would be met with understanding and compassion.
The College acknowledged that there was not much in the way of information to support these patients nor the anaesthetists looking after them, and agreed that this gap needed to be addressed given the relatively high occurrence of the condition in the UK. Current reports estimate that there are 250,000 people living with ME/CFS at any one time in the UK, but this is likely to be a gross underestimate as traditionally it is poorly diagnosed, and many Long COVID patients fulfil ME/CFS diagnostic criteria. The most recent ONS survey reports 1.7 million people in the UK living with Long COVID.
This was new territory for the College, as producing information without a comprehensive body of evidence for such a poorly understood medical condition was something we had never done before.
Could you be part of next year’s cohort of CR&I fellows? Dr Adam Hunt tells us about the many wider benefits of a fellowship.
Would you like dedicated time to build your experience in research and QI while continuing clinical practice? Perhaps, you’re looking for mentorship from leading clinicians, researchers and policymakers in perioperative medicine? A fellowship with the Centre for Research and Improvement (CR&I) could be a perfect fit.
Alongside several other fellows, I’ve had the pleasure of a CR&I fellowship for the past year. Fellowships generally last 12 months, however several previous fellows have used the opportunity to develop proposals and obtain funding for higher degrees to continue their work. Fellows are attached to RCoA research projects, previously including PQIP, NELA, the QI Working Group, SNAPs and NAPs, among others.
Dr Matthew Luney tells us about becoming a non-COVID-19-focused researcher during the pandemic.
Find out more about our two-year national project in collaboration with THIS Institute to improve the time it takes for patients to have emergency bowel surgery.
The Royal College of Anaesthetists has undertaken a two-year national project in collaboration with The Healthcare Improvement Studies (THIS) Institute to use new approaches to improve the time it takes for patients to have emergency bowel surgery.
The time taken for patients to get to the emergency operating theatre remains a stubborn problem, despite many years of research and national guidance emphasising the importance of prompt surgery to reduce morbidity and mortality.
The diagnostic and treatment pathways are complex – involving clinicians from emergency medicine, anaesthesia, surgery, critical care, radiology, and often other specialties. Patients also require resources like CT scanners and operating theatres that are often in short supply. Thinking about the multiple steps each patient must traverse, it is no surprise that they often don’t get speedy access to the operating theatre.
Professor Andrew Smith and Dr Olusola Oladosu provide suggestions to help colleagues at all levels become familiar with videolaryngoscopy.
The Difficult Airway Society (DAS) recommends awake tracheal intubation as a primary airway management technique in people with difficult airways. It can be achieved either by fibreoptic bronchoscopy or videolaryngoscopy. However, in our experience, despite the guidance, anaesthetists are sometimes reluctant to perform either.
While it’s useful to be able to perform both techniques depending on what’s needed for the patient, videolaryngoscopy requires fewer technical skills and can be applied with a comparable success rate and safety profile to fibreoptic intubation. Furthermore, the more commonly the procedure is undertaken, the more that anaesthetists and the wider anaesthesia and theatre teams come to regard it as a straightforward, almost ‘everyday’ event. This creates a virtuous circle where it then becomes even easier to consider and perform.
With this in mind, we suggest that anaesthetists should be introduced to awake video intubation early in their career. Seeing that airway management can take place without general anaesthesia opens up a range of possibilities and gives them further confidence for managing the various patients that could present with anticipated and unanticipated difficult airways.
SAS doctors have been educational supervisors for many years and find it a rewarding role. Dr Kirstin May and Dr Robert Fleming discuss the importance of SAS doctors in education.
Duncan McMillan, our Head of Content welcomes you to a new feature in which we share and showcase education and training content to keep you up-to-date.