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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)

It is safe to say that the laryngoscope is one of the most recognisable tools within anaesthesia. A piece of equipment that has evolved throughout the years to be used by airway specialists, the humble laryngoscope allows us to perform one of the fundamentals of anaesthesia: to intubate an airway.

Dr Alison Pittard, OBE: "The end of my tenure brings an opportunity to reflect on the last three years. COVID-19 has dominated and it is easy to focus on the negatives, but, as an eternal optimist, I see many positives. I had three objectives when I became dean, the first of which was to promote our specialty."

"As I sit down to write this article, I am very much aware that today is the anniversary of the death of my mother. A strong-minded, intelligent and, above all, proud woman, her greatest fear as she became increasingly physically frail was a loss of dignity."

A warm welcome to our new HRSC fellows.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government talked about their goal of delivering ‘shots in arms’ as the ultimate goal of the vaccine efforts. This wasn’t an exercise in expanding scientific knowledge or customising production, but the aim was clearly stated as being to deliver those advances to citizens in order to prevent them from becoming patients.

The Associate Principal Investigator (API) scheme is a new initiative from the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) which aims to formalise research involvement for those not normally exposed to research in their day-to-day jobs.

Jason Williams-James, RCoA Patients Voices member with personal experience of surgery and anaesthesia, discusses the importance of DrEaMing with Eleanor
Warwick, ST6 Anaesthetist and Perioperative Quality Improvement Programme (PQIP) Fellow. They discuss why patients, the surgical multidisciplinary team (MDT), and organisations should be interested in this quality improvement metric.