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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.

Firstly, participation in research can be claimed as a CPD activity to help meet this supporting information requirement. Research will often be done online and may be used to supplement the knowledge gained from another CPD activity such as attending a course or event. 

It can be claimed on the basis of one credit per hour when accompanied by reflection showing how it has applied to your scope of clinical practice.

Some doctors make reference to the prompts: ‘What?’, ‘So what?’, and ‘Now what?’, and the CPD activities section in the Lifelong Learning Platform features three corresponding boxes for reflection entitled: ‘Review’, ‘Experience gained’ and ‘Resulting change’.

I have recently been appointed as an Examiner for the Royal College of Anaesthetists FRCA examination. It was a moment of great pride and achievement for me, but also very humbling and surprising to know that I was the first SAS doctor to be appointed as an examiner for the College. It has made me reflect on my journey as an SAS doctor and how I got to become an examiner.

I completed my undergraduate medical and postgraduate anaesthetic training in Mumbai, India. Like a lot of doctors from India in the early 2000s, I chose to come to the UK on a ‘permit-free training’ visa to train and work in the NHS, be better paid, and have a better balance between work and life. I first applied as a clinical observer at Basingstoke hospital and then was successful at interview for the senior house officer (SHO) post in August 2003. This was the first time that I became aware of the SAS grade of non-training doctors in the UK. In 2003, Basingstoke already had six SAS doctors on full-time or part-time contracts. They were a motivated group of doctors who had their own fixed lists and worked independently anaesthetising for complex cases. But at that time, like everyone else, I was intent on trying to train and become a consultant.

In my role as a patient representative, I am committed to represent the patient voice to ensure it is at the centre of everything we do.

For those who may not know, CPOC is a cross-specialty initiative made up of 11 partners dedicated to the advancement and development of perioperative care. Perioperative care means the whole patient journey from the GP’s, to when a patient returns home after surgery. Our vision is to improve the health of people of all ages, at all stages of their surgical journey, by promoting the highest standards of perioperative care.

Improving perioperative care will make a difference to a lot of things important to patients, including getting fitter before surgery, better pain management (getting mobile quicker), recovery (getting out of hospital faster), reducing anxiety felt, and putting the patient at the centre of all decisions about treatment.

In this issue we’re focusing on research, highlighting a small selection of the education and information resources available to you, our members. We showcase some of our work to support high-quality healthcare research and hope you find these resources useful.

Meet our new research fellows and find more about them, their work and their interests outside anaesthesia.

Some of you might be asking (or have forgotten) – what is this eFONA registry thing? Why? 

In short, emergency front-of-neck access is an unusual, emergency event about which we have limited information – what leads up to it, what happens during the event, what happens afterwards. Various studies, not least NAP4, have highlighted the need to understand more – so, the eFONA registry project was born.

I am a huge fan of the Beano and sent feedback to the Royal College of Anaesthetists about a special collaborative edition I had read, Dennis has an anaesthetic. My Granny was in hospital at the time, and I was worried about her. She had broken her ankle. I read the Beano comic to help me understand and feel better about her being unwell and having an operation.

Children’s anxiety related to hospital admissions and procedures is a huge problem and affects up to 80% of children. 75% experience anxiety in the anaesthetic room, and 60% develop ‘new’ dysfunctional behaviour in the three weeks after surgery. Sadly, 12% still display this new behaviour one year after surgery. In the US, surveys show that 25% of children are held down for a general anaesthetic.

Dennis has an anaesthetic teaches children about:

• finding out about the operation
• getting ready for the operation
• having the anaesthetic and operation
• waking up and going home.

Had your head buried very deeply in the sand for most of the last decade? Then it may have escaped your attention that the UK has cleaved itself away from the European Union. But fear not! The College and the Association of Anaesthetists are both still represented on the European Board of Anaesthesiology (EBA), the Anaesthesia section of the European Union of Medical Specialists.

Known by its French acronym, UEMS is a non-governmental organisation created in 1958 in the same year as the European parliament. The aims of UEMS are to improve patient care throughout Europe by developing and supporting excellence in specialist medical training and practice and, as a by-product, to promote free movement of medical specialists around the EU.

The UEMS represents more than 1.6 million specialist doctors from 41 countries:

• full UEMS members – EU countries plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, UK
• associate members – Armenia, Israel, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine
• observer countries – Georgia, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia.