Dave Bunting

The BADS Annual Conference has now been rescheduled to take place on Thursday 18^th March 2021. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, it will be conducted as a virtual conference which will be delivered free of charge to all current BADS members. The one-day virtual conference will focus on how day surgery can be used to recover elective surgery in the Covid-19 era. BADS are encouraging authors to submit abstracts of their work. Abstracts will as usual be peer-review and scored. Accepted work will be presented in e-poster format. There will be gold, silver and bronze awards for high scoring abstracts and the top scoring authors will be invited to deliver oral presentations that will be broadcast during a prize paper session at the conference.

The abstract submission window has been extended with a new deadline of Sunday 24^th January 2021. This is the link to abstract submission:

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

The importance of day surgery as the major contributor to the future of surgical services and a key to increasing productivity as we work through the Covid-19 pandemic has been recognised by the Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) NHS Improvement Programme, who in collaboration with BADS and the Centre for Perioperative Care (CPOC) have recently published the National Day Surgery Delivery Pack. The pack is designed to enable NHS Trusts to expand and increase day surgery for the benefit of patients and the wider healthcare system. It highlights significant room for improvement with wide variation in day surgery rates across the UK. It makes a compelling case for expanding and increasing day surgery services; it describes the key components of a successful generic day surgery pathway and details procedure-specific best practice pathways and templates. The importance of this initiative is given further credence with the recent news from NHS England Referral-to-Treatment statistics that 100 times more patients are waiting over a year for elective hospital treatment compared to this time last year.

The National Day Surgery Delivery Pack can be found here:

https://www.gettingitrightfirsttime.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/National-Day-Surgery-Delivery-Pack_Sept2020_final.pdf

Original papers in this edition of JODS include a review of day-case parathyroidectomy performed in a single institution over a 10-year period; a report on over 400 patients undergoing hysterectomy as a daycase; an investigation into the potential benefits of patients supplying their own post-operative analgesia and a report on introduction of a daycase pathway for total hip replacement.

In this edition of JODS, three updated ‘How I Do It’ day case guides are presented, this month with a Urology theme. They include guides on Green Light Laser Prostatectomy, Trans-urethral Resection of Prostate and Day Case Bipolar Saline Prostatectomy.

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.

Perhaps by the time the next edition of JODS is published in February next year we may be seeing some positive effects of widespread coronavirus vaccination that will help us in the process of restoring day surgery productivity.