Kim Russon

I hope you are all safe, well and managed to get some rest over the Christmas period. Unfortunately, 2021 has not started in a way we would have ideally wished, with Covid19 numbers rising and Mr Johnson announcing that the NHS should move to alert level 5 and that the country would begin another national lockdown. Thankfully, the lockdown seems to be working, and hospital Covid19 numbers appear to be stabilising and hopefully will soon start to fall. The NHS is still under tremendous pressure and in many hospitals elective surgery has had to stop again. This causes great concern as we are already aware of growing waiting lists with over 80,000 patients known to have been waiting over 1 year for surgery and over 4 million unreferred patients. It has been reported that even if elective surgery returns to 110 or 120% of pre-covid levels it may take years to “catch up”.

Day surgery continues to be recognised as a potential solution and in centres where Covid-secure pathways have been developed, day surgery has been able to carry on. As I mentioned in November, the GIRFT Elective surgery recovery and transformation programme promotes day surgery pathways and is hoped to be able to rolled out nationally. At the recent BADS/HCC Day case general surgery conference we heard Ms Stella Vig describe how by utilising day surgery pathways, Croydon University Hospital achieved greater than 100% of activity as compared to pre-covid activity to help tackle its growing waiting lists due to the impact of Covid-19 pandemic.

BADS is delighted to announce that we are continuing our collaboration with Health Care Conferences (HCC) to bring you one day speciality focussed conferences where teams achieving successful day surgery share their knowledge and pathways to enable other centres to learn how to deliver similar services.

• Daycase Major Knee Surgery –25^th March 2021
• Day Case Total Hip Replacement –29^th April 2021
• Day Surgery in Gynaecology – 20^th May 2021
• Day Case General Surgery During Covid19 18^th June 2021
• Breast Surgery as Day Surgery 7^th Sept 2021
• Day case Urology Date TBC

We also have our BADS annual conference next month with great speakers and an excellent programme which we hope will assist hospitals to recover elective surgery using day surgery pathways. If you haven’t already registered then please do soon. Registration is free for BADS members and if you are not available on the 18^th March then the recording will be available afterwards for 3months for non-BADS members and 1 year for BADS members.

During this continued time of pressure, both on our working lives and home lives it is important to consider our wellbeing. BADS council took a moment during our recent council meeting for #coffeeandagas which is an Association of Anaesthetists campaign to help wellbeing and promote better teamwork. Please look after yourselves and each other.

I look forward to welcoming you all to the BADS conference 18^th March 2021.