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Pursuing excellence in our services for members

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.

I fully appreciate that there are some areas where we need to do better – you have told us where we need to improve, and we have been listening, acting and improving wherever we can. Our response time is one example. We have made it a priority to respond to your enquiries in a more timely way and to reduce the number of outstanding emails, particularly those relating to training.

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). 

One component of the latest NAP (NAP7) was a baseline survey of all anaesthetists in the UK. We identified that tracking and responding to more than 200 survey participants posed a significant challenge. In this article, we seek to describe how technological solutions can aid participation, compliance tracking, and survey administration.

It all started conventionally enough – A-levels, a medical degree, house officer jobs. Nobody in my family was medical, so I had no preconceived ideas about postgraduate career pathways.

During my interview for the regional Obstetrics and Gynaecology training scheme, I was asked how I would combine this career with getting married and having a family. As I wasn’t in a relationship at the time, I didn’t feel this was a major consideration, and fortunately neither did the other members of the interview panel!

However, having completed the training scheme and obtained my MRCOG, my career then took a different path…

As your new elected anaesthetist in training (AiT) members of the Bulletin’s editorial board, we would like to welcome you to the AiT edition of the Bulletin. We're very excited to be taking over from Dr Susie Thoms and Dr Soumen Sen, and would like to thank them for their excellent work with both the Bulletin and The Gas Newsletter in recent years.

Looking at the current landscape, we wanted to touch on a few issues that we have recently been discussing within the College’s Anaesthetists in Training Representative Group and its Anaesthetists in Training Committee.

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is the latest iteration freely available on the internet. Trained using transformer architecture, it generates human-like text by sifting through terabytes of data and billions of written works from internet sources¹ – many from familiar authors – to create human-like answers to prompts or questions.

As an experiment, I prompted ChatGPT to write this article, and it produced a not-terrible piece of work – although Reader, you will be reassured to know that this publication is man-made.

For your enjoyment, here is an example of a prompt related to anaesthesia:

Read the latest letters submitted by members in Winter's Bulletin. If you'd like to submit a letter to the editor, please email us.

Trigger warning: This article discusses baby loss

1 in 225 foetuses die before or during delivery in the UK each year. A third of these are term babies – born at 37 weeks or beyond – who were considered healthy before their death.

Women in the UK are routinely offered induction of labour after 41 weeks gestation. The risk of stillbirth increases from 0.11 per 1,000 pregnancies at 37 weeks to 3.18 per 1,000 at 42 weeks. In mothers whose pregnancy continued to 41 weeks, there is a 64 per cent increase in the risk of stillbirth compared with mothers who delivered at 40 weeks.¹

Winter can be hard for many of us, with the combination of longer nights, shorter days and the rounds of respiratory infections that come our way.

It can help to think of wellbeing as a balance between restorative and protective activities and those activities that are draining or reinvigorating. These are, of course, different for each of us and so the best person to advise you on what works for you is yourself. That said, there are some simple steps that are likely to pay real dividends and help you thrive through the long dark winter months.

In recent years, the College Council has grown the number of co-opted members of Council to include representation from anaesthetists in training, FRCA examinations, defence anaesthesia and regional advisors anaesthesia. 

Since September 2022, the College Council has welcomed new representatives to support all clinical, professional, and health policy matters. Following on from the four new Council members featured in April’s Bulletin, you can read more about our new members below.