As I write my final letter to you as President, I am really pleased to be able to share a number of initiatives with which BADS have been recently collaborating. The last few months have been extraordinarily busy for a number of council and I am very grateful to them for all their hard work.  The long awaited joint publication between BADS and the Association of Anaesthetists has now been finalised and is available via the AAGBI website: https://anaesthetists.org/Home/Resources-publications/Guidelines/Day-case-and-short-stay-surgery. This, along with the GPAS guidelines produced jointly with the Royal College of Anaesthetists, is an extremely useful resource which I would recommend to anyone involved in aspects of management of a day surgery service.  Members of Council are also currently contributing to the Royal College of Anaesthetist Curriculum and also redesigning the day surgery section of their Compendium of Audit Recipes. We hope both of these will be released in the autumn.

The 6^th edition of our Directory of Procedures is now in print and will be launched at our Conference in June. It will also be available for purchase via the website so time to “throw out the orange and bring in the blue”! We are currently working with the team from the model hospital who are updating their day surgery compartment to reflect the new benchmarking figures and procedures within the 6^th edition. This too should be available for release to coincide with our conference.  One of the major revolutions in day surgery in the past 2 years which is reflected within the Directory is the advent of total hip and knee replacements as day surgery.  We have run a number of events over the past year supporting and educating teams who wish to launch a day surgery arthroplasty service. We are currently collaborating with the team from Northumberland to run a series of events and have places available on courses in Manchester in June and Newcastle in October. Details are on the website. A joint publication by BADS and the Northumberland team about setting up a day surgery arthroplasty service is also available via our website. 

Over the past few months council members have run and lectured at a large number of meetings:

• in Edinburgh in collaboration with the Scottish government where it was great to see such enthusiasm for day surgery development from our colleagues north of the border
• with Healthcare Conferences we have run or contributed meetings on hip surgery, theatre efficiency and day case general surgery
• next week a number of us will be heading over to beautiful Porto to represent BADS at the International Association of Ambulatory Surgery. It’s not too late to book your tickets and join us!

Recent collaboration with the teams from Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) is proving productive to both us and GIRFT and we are delighted to be forging strong links with their national clinical advisors to ensure that day surgery is well represented within the GIRFT surgical programmes.

As I sign off on my last President’s letter I would like to express my huge thanks to all members of council who have supported me through the 3 years I have been in post. However particular recognition should go to Anna Lipp my predecessor who stands down from Council next month after more than 13 years of service not only as president but previously as publications committee lead.  Anna has always been a voice of reason and common sense, she has worked tirelessly for the Association for many years, her contributions have been invaluable and we are extremely grateful for all her hard work. I would also like to publicly express my gratitude to Nicola Adams, our administrator ,for her hard work and constantly keeping the show on the road for us all. Finally, Paul Rawlings stands down from Council this year and we are very grateful to Paul for stepping into the role of Honorary Secretary at very short notice and doing such a good job during his 4 years in post. As I hand over as president I know I am leaving the Association in excellent hands with Kim Russon taking over as President and an excellent team on Council to support her. Thank you to you all for your support, encouragement, contributions and enthusiasm and if you have not booked your place for our conference in June please do, we would love to see you all there.