Mary Stocker

As the year draws to a close it seems a natural time to reflect on all that has been achieved within 2017 and look forward to the challenges and opportunities awaiting us next year.

I am delighted to report that our association has grown by over 10% in 2017 so welcome to all our new members and welcome back to those who have been with us somewhat longer!  We have been busy over the last few months developing the membership benefits offered to you.

Our website has been revamped and hopefully is clearer and easier to navigate.  I would like to highlight to you two new areas of the website which may be of interest to you.

1. Benchmarking Resource

We were very disappointed to learn this year that the Better Care Better Values sight previously hosted by NHS Digital was to be decommissioned.  In recent years this has provided us will valuable benchmarking information enabling us to identify day surgery rates for individual hospital trusts for all the procedures within the BADS Directory. The team at NHS digital have generously provided us with a very useful spread sheet which we have linked too through the resources section of our website. This allows you to benchmark your trusts day surgery performance against our 200 procedures over the last two years. Benchmarking of activity is one of the key priorities for BADS and we are now working closely with NHS Improvement to develop a tool which enables you not only to clearly identify your trusts day case rates across our entire range of procedures but also to see who the national top performers are for each procedure so we can all learn from our national experts.  We also hope to be able to add some additional information around unplanned admission rates for each procedure as a measure of quality of your day surgery service – watch this space. 

2. Day Surgery Dilemmas

You will also notice a new Day Surgery Dilemmas section within the website where we hope to build a series of documents giving advice on some of the key dilemmas that you, our members raise with us. Anna Lipp has kindly authored the first of these on Venous Thromboembolism, more to follow – if you have any hot topics you would like addressed please send them in to us. 

Council are currently working to update our list of day surgery units and contact people across the UK.  We will soon be contacting you to ask for the name of your day surgery unit and the medical and nursing lead for day surgery within your trust.  Having this information will ensure that we can spread day surgery information more efficiently to a wider audience so please do help us to get our contacts up to date.

Education via national conferences is a large part of BADS work. In November we ran another successful conference focussing on emergency day surgery in collaboration with Healthcare Conferences. This topic continues to be of great interest and a range of challenging and inspiring speakers certainly stimulated lots of constructive discussion. If you missed the chance to attend keep an eye on the website as we hope to re-run this event in the spring. Plans for our ASM in Sheffield are coming together and our conference secretaries Kim Russon and Fiona Belfield have developed an excellent programme. Registration opens in January as does abstract submission so do get those projects finished and written up in time to submit by the end of March. We are delighted that we have been invited to run a session at the Association of Anaesthetists Winter Scientific Meeting in January 2019 and are busy putting a programme together for this which will provide an excellent opportunity to showcase day surgery developments to the wider anaesthetic community.

Finally we have recently been approached by a television production company who are interested in commissioning a documentary series about day surgery for the BBC so hopefully everyone will be talking about Day Surgery in 2018!