Dave Bunting

This month, the NHS Chief Executive Sir Simon Stevens and NHS Improvement Chief Operating Officer Amanda Pritchard wrote a letter to NHS leaders calling for Trusts to recover at least 80% of their last year’s activity for outpatient/day case procedures (in addition to short-stay overnight elective procedures). It is vital that day surgery pathways are prioritised as they have huge potential to help in meeting this demand. Many day surgery units are ideal environments to open as ‘green’ zones where COVID negative patients can be brought in for treatment and discharged on the same day, with minimal impact on other hospital departments and bed occupancy. It is essential, therefore, that NHS Trusts prioritise the re-opening and ring-fencing of day surgery beds so productivity can be increased.

Readers will probably be aware by now that the Annual Conference has now been rescheduled to take place on 18^th-19^th March 2021 at the Cardiff City Hall. There is a new abstract submission deadline of Friday 8^th January 2021. This is the link to abstract submission:

https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/login?redirect=/stages/1625/submissions/new

This year BADS again plans to co-host several national and regional meetings in association with external organisations such as Health Care Conferences UK (HCUK). The conference environment has gone through important and necessary changes this year due to COVID restrictions and whilst the normal group audience meetings cannot be held in the same way, these changes offer exciting opportunities to host meetings in different ways to generate novel educational experiences. The HCUK meetings this year will be held as hybrid events offering a web-based virtual conference experience in addition to on-site attendance. Reduced dependence on individual travel and on-site presence offers the possibility of bringing conferences to a much larger audience.

• BADS/HCUK Conference on Day Case Major Knee Surgery will be held on Monday 5^th October 2020 at the De Vere W1 Conference Centre, London
• BADS/HCUK Conference on Day Case Total Hip Replacement will be held on Wednesday 4^th November 2020 at the Studio Conference Centre, Birmingham
• BADS/HCUK Conference on Day Surgery in Gynaecology will be held on Thursday 19^th November 2020 at the De Vere W1 Conference Centre, London
• BADS/HCUK Conference on Breast Surgery as Day Surgery will be held on Tuesday 1^st December 2020 at the Studio Conference Centre, Manchester
• BADS/HCUK Conference on Developing your Daycase General Surgery Service will be held on Friday 4^th December 2020 at the De Vere West One Conference Centre, London

Further details of all the above conferences can be found in this edition of JODS.

Original papers in this edition of JODS include two original articles on the topic of day case mastectomy. One discusses the benefits of using Fibrin Sealant Spray to reduce the routine use of drains and increase daycase rates; and the other describes a service improvement project successfully increasing the daycase mastectomy rate after introducing a programme of education. The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust have produced a report demonstrating the feasibility and safety of daycase/short-stay laparoscopic cholecystectomy in patients with morbid obesity supporting the BADS view that obesity should not be a barrier to daycase surgery.  The Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust is one of few trusts in the UK regularly performing daycase shoulder surgery and describe how remarkably high (>90%) daycase rates can be achieved in their publication of a case series. Finally, the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust are one of the highest performers nationally in daycase fundoplication surgery and present their data on over 200 cases performed with a daycase rate of over 85%.

Some years ago, BADS commissioned a series of ‘How I do it’ guides for publication in JODS. Each guide is presented as an - easy to digest - single page document, covering anaesthetic technique, surgical technique, peri-operative analgesia, take home medication, organisational issues, common pitfalls, and anticipated day case rates. The guides have been updated for this year and we will be publishing them over the next few JODS issues starting with the following guides in this edition:

• ‘How I do it - Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy’
• ‘How I do it - Laparoscopic hysterectomy’
• ‘How I do it - Laparoscopic Nephrectomy’

Please keep your submissions to the journal coming in and remember – JODS still offers citable peer-reviewed publication with no author processing fees. Author guidelines and submission instructions can be found in this edition of the journal.

Finally, please enjoy this edition of JODS, looks after yourselves and stay safe.