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

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.

The 2021 SAS contract reform introduced a new strategic role to support the health and wellbeing of the SAS workforce, the ‘SAS Advocate’. This role provides an opportunity to challenge the status quo, and to potentially change the culture and expectations associated with being an SAS doctor.

Perhaps the most common barrier to meaningful change is culture. Individuals and organisations can both be guilty of assuming that the status quo always exists for a reason. However, there is perhaps no more dangerous justification for continuing to do something than that ‘we have always done it this way’.

Our working lives as anaesthetists revolve around effective teamwork, communication, and empathy with the many different professions we interact with. Interprofessional education (IPE) is an increasingly familiar teaching methodology which aims to enhance and improve these collaborative abilities. 

Considering recent critical reports on the lack of teamwork and interprofessional co-operation within clinical systems, we present a review of IPE and how its increased adoption may help address these failings.

Welcome to the autumn edition of the Bulletin.

As I write this, there is a sombre atmosphere as the funeral arrangements for Queen Elizabeth II proceed, and I want to take the opportunity to pay my respect to her and to her devotion to duty in this editorial. Although it was not unexpected, I was surprised how deeply her death affected me – I felt keenly what a historic moment the death of the longest-serving monarch in British history, and the second-longest in world history, was.

This is also my last editorial as editor of the Bulletin as I take on the vice-president’s robe and hand the Bulletin role to one of my colleagues. It has been a pleasure, and I have very much enjoyed the challenge of curating, commissioning, and advising our authors. I am so proud of the achievement as we head towards a much better digital version of the Bulletin, and I particularly want to thank the publishing co-ordinators, Anamika and Mandie, for the support, encouragement, chasing and cajoling they have done. Without them the Bulletin would be a shadow of what it is.

I write this month’s President’s View in the week following the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. On behalf of the College, I extend our condolences to the Royal Family. I hope that the expression of admiration and love felt for the Queen worldwide has been of some comfort to them. Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal has long been a dedicated and supportive patron of the Royal College of Anaesthetists, and our thoughts are with her at this time of personal sadness, with which many of us can empathise.

I recently listened to two anaesthetists talking in a coffee-shop queue.
One was of a certain age and clearly exasperated at having to contemplate the supposed burnout levels in my generation of anaesthetists in training. He simply couldn’t understand it. After all, in his day they worked hundred hour weeks! ‘Bloody snowflakes’, he reflected. The other nodded gravely.

‘Snowflake’ is a term commonly wielded by our elders to bludgeon what they deem to be a fragile, over-sensitive and under-resilient youth of today. A people unable to cope with life. It does however require a certain amount of historical amnesia to use this slight without some irony catching in the throat. Did they not enjoy rock bottom housing prices, free higher education and high levels of job security, only to then preside over their decimation?

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, something she had witnessed in the slow demise of her own mother.

From middle age onwards, she wrote me detailed letters describing what she would and would not tolerate as she got older, and instructing me, the only doctor in the family, to do everything possible to help her to die peacefully when the intolerable became manifest. Sadly, the law forbade such measures and, despite receiving excellent care in her failing years, she suffered much of the indignity that she most feared before passing.