Search

Perhaps you’d like to re-read a past issue? Our full selection of back digital issues has you covered and will keep you up-to-date and informed on what’s happening in our specialty. We hope you continue enjoying your membership magazine.

In the dynamic and challenging world of healthcare, the decision to ‘act up’ as an intensive care unit (ICU) consultant is a significant step in a trainee doctor's career. 

It marks a pivotal moment where one transitions from the supportive cocoon of training to the forefront of decision-making, all while still enjoying the protective umbrella of being a trainee.

In this article, I share my personal experience to shed light on why I chose to act up, the intricate process involved, and the invaluable lessons learned during this transformative period.

In the last Bulletin, I talked about the work done to complete a major review of our supporting information for appraisal and revalidation. The updated documentation is available on our website, and this article provides some extracts on the guidance for collecting colleague and patient feedback.

For collecting patient feedback, the key principles from The GMC’s Guidance on Supporting Information for Revalidation can be summarised as follows.

Whenever we introduce ourselves in the team brief, we tend to get the same response: ‘Anaesthetics? As FY1s? That’s unusual!’ They are right, of course, and we feel lucky to be here! Both of us, unsurprisingly, were very nervous about starting our first jobs as doctors in August.

Fortunately, we settled in quickly thanks to being well supported by the anaesthetic consultants, SASs, anaesthetists in training, and operating department practitioners. We thought it would be a great idea to share our unique experience of starting on an anaesthetics rotation straight after medical school.

Whereas many of our FY1 friends describe endless ward rounds, discharge letters and medications, we’ve had a very hands-on first month – lots of cannulas, airway management, iGels, intubations, and even some spinals. We initially found the idea of one-to-one consultant training quite daunting, this being something we hadn’t encountered much at medical school. However, we couldn’t have been more wrong – we’ve had nothing but positive experiences with our seniors, even if we’re taught a different way to tie a knot and secure the airway by each consultant.

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.

• Dr Jonathan Rajan, Consultant in Pain Medicine and Anaesthesia, Salford Royal NHS Trust
• Dr Katharine Ireland, Pain Medicine Trainee, Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust
• Dr Victoria Winter, Pain Medicine Trainee, Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust
• Dr Helen Makins, Consultant in Pain Medicine and Anaesthesia, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Multiple reports have highlighted the importance of workplace wellbeing. Institutions that prioritise workplace wellbeing perform better, with improved patient experience, higher staff satisfaction and lower rates of sickness absence.

38% of NHS staff in England reported suffering from work-related stress, and the 2023 GMC Survey showed the proportion of trainees at risk of burnout to be the highest since they started tracking this in 2018. The impact of a career in pain medicine on the wellbeing of a pain physician can be significant, including the emotional burden of treating patients in distress, and the additional impacts of training, career development and examinations. Access to wellbeing support can be further nuanced in smaller subspecialties, with fewer trainees, less potential jobs and a far smaller community of working clinical practice.

With this in mind the issue was raised at the FPM Board, and work began to identify barriers to the reporting of uncivilised behaviour, and to identify possible solutions.

Climate change is a healthcare emergency. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been greater than 350 parts per million (ppm) since 1988. If you’re younger than 37 years old, your whole life has been spent in carbon dioxide excess.

In collaboration, the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine, Intensive Care Society and UK Critical Care Nursing Alliance, alongside Brighton University, are taking action.

Together, we are developing a ‘Recipe Book’ to share actions in critical care units to reduce energy use, reduce waste and improve sustainability.

• Dr Jaimin Arya, ST6, East Midlands Deanery

Perioperative Journal Watch is written by TRIPOM (trainees with an interest in perioperative medicine) and is a brief distillation of recent important papers and articles on perioperative medicine from across the spectrum of medical publications.

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.