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Page 4 | Bulletin 93 | September 2015 Series The President’s Title Statement All change at Red Lion Square! ‘You say goodbye and I say hello’ [Hello, Goodbye – The Beatles] Liam Brennan President As I write this, my first statement for the College Bulletin, it is mid-summer and only a few weeks since Council did me the huge honour of electing me as President, with effect from September 2015. For those who do not know me, I have served the College and wider specialty in a variety of capacities over the past 20 years – as College Tutor, Training Programme Director, Deputy RA and FRCA examiner, culminating in my election to Council in 2010. Since joining Council I have chaired many of the major College committees, as well as leading the development of the trainee e-portfolio, advising the College on paediatric matters, and gaining experience of the wider medico-political scene as Vice-President over the past two years. Aside from my extensive College profile, I have a wide-ranging clinical practice based in Cambridge for both adult and specialised paediatric anaesthesia; I plan to maintain this as much as possible during my Term of Office. I am certain that continuing to be ‘hands-on’ is essential to maintain credibility as President, to be better able to promote the needs of patients, and to reflect your opinions to the wider profession and the political classes. I am joined on the 5 th floor at Churchill House by two new Vice-Presidents: Richard Marks, based at the Royal Free Hospital, and Jeremy Langton, at Plymouth. Both bring a wealth of experience in complementary areas of College activities and I look forward to working with them in the year ahead, along with the rest of Council, our new CEO, Tom Grinyer, and our recently expanded senior management team. It would be remiss of me not to pay tribute to our outgoing Officers, J-P van Besouw and Peter Venn. In J-P, the College has been lucky to have had such a towering figure (in all respects!) as our leader for the past three years. He has combined a thorough knowledge of all aspects of perioperative practice with great political awareness, to expertly steer the specialty during his tenure. He has left us in a better position to weather what will undoubtedly be very challenging times for anaesthesia and UK healthcare over the next few years. Peter Venn conceived and led the College’s ACSA initiative from the outset and it is fitting that during his term as Vice- President this milestone project has come to full maturity. The way ahead In 2011, I led the first comprehensive review of the FRCA examinations benchmarked against the GMC Standards for Assessment. This focused on the utility of our examinations (including their educational impact, reliability, validity and cost effectiveness), and took into account the opinions of trainees, patients and trainers. This process, acknowledged as exemplary by the GMC, is now established on a triennial basis and the most recent review – led by Plat Razis – recently reported to Council. Elsewhere in this edition of the Bulletin, Plat provides a comprehensive discussion of the review’s recommendations. My thanks go to Plat and the whole Review Group for their efforts in delivering this important project, ensuring that our examinations, central to the work of the College, reflect contemporary assessment practice. We can be sure that they remain fit for purpose with the regulator and credible with our trainees, trainers and wider specialty, to the ultimate benefit of our patients. Education, education, education... The College maintains its strong links to academic anaesthesia through a variety of means, but historically our most enduring relationship has been with the BJA, which predates the College and its previous incarnation as a Faculty by some 25 years. It is therefore very gratifying to highlight success and innovation for the journal and its more recent off shoot, Continuing Education in Anaesthesia, Critical Care & Pain (CEACCP). One of the key indicators for the performance of an academic journal is its impact factor, a measure reflecting the average number of citations in recently published articles. This is frequently
Page 5 | Bulletin 93 | September 2015 The President’s Statement used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field. In the newly published 2014 ratings, the BJA received its highest ever impact factor, confirming its position as the leading European anaesthetics journal – globally second only to Anesthesiology. CEACCP, launched nearly 25 years ago, has gone from strength to strength and is now the world’s leading life-long learning publication for anaesthesia, critical care and pain medicine, with over 100,000 downloads annually. Recently CEACCP has been relaunched as BJA Education, in order to emphasise its close relationship with the BJA brand. To better reflect this rising global interest, there will be an increased number of editions annually, with more articles per edition, as well as greater international representation on the Editorial Board. A meeting of minds I have been attending the annual College Tutors’ meetings for a number of years. It has been gratifying to see these events evolve from the top-down dispensing of policy and edicts from Council, to a much wider sharing of views by all attendees. This year’s meeting in Nottingham, attended by over 300 delegates, was one of the most successful in recent years, including excellent plenaries and breakout sessions. Highlights included truly inspiring presentations on Mastery Learning, a new method of deconstructing the teaching of clinical skills by Al May, and the Education Checklist – an approach to identifying the learning needs of all the multidisciplinary team in the theatre environment by Kirsty MacLennan. More on both these initiatives will follow in a future Bulletin. We were also pleased to welcome several keynote speakers including Professor Ian Curran (an anaesthetist!) and Dr Vicky Osgood, both from the GMC Directorate of Education and Standards. Ian and Vicky gave well received, balanced presentations on the current GMC thinking behind the regulation of postgraduate medical education. This shows that we have come a long way from the dark days of the strained relationship which we, along with all medical Royal Colleges, endured with the previous regulator, PMETB. Us and them? Ensuring that the voice of anaesthesia is heard in national forums is a key part of the role of President. I recently attended a joint meeting of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and the leadership of NHS England, where there was a robust but constructive exchange of views regarding our joint aim of ensuring we have a high quality, sustainable NHS. Various themes were discussed, including the Five Year Forward View, Seven-Day Services, Improving Survival in Acute Care and – the elephant in the room – the necessary resources to deliver this challenging agenda. It was clear that many of the current College-led initiatives, such as the perioperative medicine collaboration (featured in this Bulletin), NELA, ACSA, and our developing profile in quality improvement, fit with the current patient and political priorities. Although it is encouraging that there is a committent to dialogue with the profession at such a senior level, results can only be delivered on the ground if there is similar engagement between local clinicians and managers. A lack of management and leadership training for clinicians is at the heart of this problem, along with poor understanding of clinical issues by those managers who do not come from a healthcare background. Without a common language to discuss fundamental issues it is difficult to make the progress that all stakeholders wish to see. Starting young is the key to resolving this problem; the College has developed an increased number of management and leadership fellowships for trainees, and has exciting plans to expand on this further with external partners over the next year. Watch this space! And finally… Our congratulations go to Colonel Peter Mahoney and Professor Jennie Hunter, who were awarded a CBE and an MBE respectively in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, and to Dr Kevin Carson, who is the newly elected President of the College of Anaesthetists of Ireland.
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