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Whether you are producing a report, a poster, or even revising your hospital’s anaesthetic charts, colour choice is important.

Choosing colours

A colour wheel is a simple tool to help choose colours and shades (Figure 1). Analogous colours are adjacent to one another, and generally combine well. Likewise, complementary colours (those opposite one another) work. Triadic schemes are based on three equally spaced colours, while quadratic schemes use four. Colour combinations found in nature are also considered pleasing.

Find out the latest appointments approved, and with sadness we record the deaths of some of our fellows. 

This article explores how to make the most of indirect supervision.

The 2021 curriculum was explicit about having ‘levels of supervision’ embedded within it. These are descriptors of the supervision level the anaesthetist in training (AiT) would require if they were to repeat the same Supervised Learning Event (SLE) immediately after. 

I’d like to wish you all a very happy New Year. I realise that January is a very challenging time in the NHS, with winter pressures compounded by ongoing staff shortages and sickness. And in looking ahead to some of the College’s priorities for 2024, I’d like to highlight some of the work we're doing to try to address these issues.  

The urgent need for more doctors to be able to train as anaesthetists is always the first thing I raise in conversations I have with the government, NHS England and other decision makers around the country. Last month I wrote to the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to set out the need to address the current shortage of anaesthestists and to outline the impact this is having on the elective care backlog, among other things. 

In the last year we have secured some incremental improvements on this front, but there is a long way to go, and we will do all we can to maintain momentum in the year ahead.

While anaesthesia has always taken great care to tread the tightrope between training and patient safety, new technologies and innovation in education practices are further improving the risk-to-benefit ratio.

The acquisition and maintenance of airway skills are fundamental for all anaesthetists. A delicate balance exists between allowing the trainee to learn practical techniques and exposing patients to potential harm, a situation which is no greater than during airway management. Clinical pressures, demands on training time and reduced operating capacity since the COVID-19 pandemic have had a major impact on learning opportunities for anaesthetists in training.

In this article, we review some new technologies which are changing how airway management is taught.