News

Andrey Varvinskiy ESAIC Examinations Committee Chair    Andrey.varvinski@nhs.net   To our  ESAIC members, colleagues, fellow examiners, candidates, I am writing to you in these difficult times for us all, hoping that first and foremost you are safe in your work environment and that in this COVID-19 battle your institution and you are on the winning side. Like many of you, I am also on the front line in this battle and this very evening will be covering emergency theatre during a 13-hour...

Jacob Michael Lurie, Debbie Chi, Maryna Khromava Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA Email: jacob.lurie@icahn.mssm.edu On March 20th, final-year medical students across the United States learned where they matched for residency. At the same time, the drastic implications of the COVID-19 pandemic were being felt across all medical specialities, including anaesthesiology. As fourth-year medical students entering the field of anaesthesiology at a time of great uncertainty and...

Gabriel M. Gurman, MD Chief editor gurman@bgu.ac.il I worked as an anaesthesiologist for more than 55 years, in three continents and five countries. I witnessed a lot of tragedies, and I had the opportunity to be involved in the management of some very severe mass casualties. I thought that I had already seen everything, so I supposed that nothing could surprise me anymore. I saw each year how influenza viruses killed a large number of patients, each winter being accompanied by numerous deaths,...

Dr Alvaro Arcocha MD. Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge (Barcelona, Spain). aarcocha@bellvitgehospital.cat I am writing this while part of my mind is still designing possible plans for future situations we might face in the course of this pandemic. But please, firstly, let me introduce the hospital where I work and my role there. I am an anaesthesiologist who is in charge of the management of critical care units and theatre rooms in a third -level hospital serving a population of 1.8 million in...

From Dr Pedro Amorim Amorpedro29f@gmail.com Dear Colleagues, In countries all over the world, the COVID-19 epidemic has reached the stage when hospitals must receive and care for many patients in need of artificial ventilation, being treated in new spaces and requiring the care of anaesthesiologists. I decided to write you this letter because we need to face the fear that threatens to paralyse us, and in the process, raise the morale, motivate, encourage and foster confidence. I am 64 years old,...

We are passing a very special period. The world is frightened, people die, social life is paralysed and it seems that life is taking a long, too long pause. And needless to say, all the scientific and professional gatherings have been postponed and nobody is able to foresee when we will be allowed to go back to our usual activities. Euroanaesthesia 2020 was planned for May-June and has been postponed by several months to the end of November. The ESAIC Newsletter used to air each year a special i...

Kristine Stave kristine@lifebox.org If surgery has become an essential part of enabling human beings to live long and healthy lives, then the World Health Organization (WHO) Surgical Safety Checklist has become an essential part of enabling safe surgery. On January 15, 2020, Lifebox, the global safe-surgery non-profit and long-time ESAIC partner, and Ariadne Labs, a centre for health systems innovation at Harvard University, released “Checking In On the Checklist,” a report – and an ac...

Frederic Michard, MD, PhD Lausanne, Switzerland Postoperative hypotension is common, largely undetected, and strongly associated with postoperative morbidity and mortality. A recent study (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30875354) showed that around 25% of postsurgical ward patients experienced at least one episode of mean arterial pressure (MAP) <70 mmHg lasting at least 30 minutes, and 18% had an episode of MAP <65 mmHg lasting at least 15 minutes. Nearly half the patients who had a MAP &l...

Prof. Daniela Filipescu European member in the WFSA Council danielafilipescu@b.astral.ro The 17th World Congress of Anaesthesiologists (WCA), hosted by the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA) and organised by the Czech Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, will take place between 5-9 September 2020 in Prague, Czech Republic (www.wcaprague2020.com). Please accept this invitation to join us. The WFSA was founded in 1955 with the occasion of the first WCA i...

Gabriel M. Gurman, MD. Editor-in-chief gurman@bgu.ac.il I still remember those days during my medical studies, many years ago, when we used to spend half a day every week in the autopsy room of the department of pathology, to learn how to use this postmortem method of investigation to improve the quality of our clinical activity, by increasing the rate of correct diagnosis. Very often we were accompanied there by our clinical teacher, who knew the diagnosis of the dead patient, compared the auto...