NIAA Newsletter: February 2013
NIAA Grants
Results from Round 2 2012
The NIAA Grants Committee met in December to consider applications submitted for the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain & Ireland (AAGBI) & Anaesthesia Small Research Grant, the Association of Cardiothoracic Anaesthetists (ACTA) Project Grant and the Regional Anaesthesia UK (RA UK) Project Grant. Twenty six applications were considered in total for a requested sum of £432,738 and a total of eight awards were made to a value of £114,167. Click here to read more about the successful projects.
Round 1 2013
We are pleased to announce that ten grants are being advertised as part of Round 1 2013, with sums of between £5,000 and £65,000 available. Full details can be found here.
BJA/RCoA Career Development Grant
Nine applications were considered for the £250k career development grant advertised by the British Journal of Anaesthesia and the Royal College of Anaesthetists in December 2012. A committee of external peer reviewers met in December and were delighted to award grants to Dr Rupert Pearse (Barts and The London School of Medicine & Dentistry) and Dr Christopher Snowden (Freeman Hospital, Newcastle). Click here to read the abstracts from the successful applicants.
RCoA Awards and Prizes
A number of applications were approved for prestigious awards and prizes at the end of 2012, including the eponymous Macintosh Professorship, which was awarded to Dr Tim Cook and Dr Suellen Walker, and the President's Award for Undergraduate Research. Click here for full details.
Details of this year's small RCoA education, travel and research grants are now on the website and the deadline for applications is Friday 30 August.
Events
AAGBI Group of Anaesthetists in Training Annual Scientific Meeting
Please click here to view the three day programme for the AAGBI's Group of Anaesthetists in Training (GAT) Annual Scientific Meeting (3-5 April 2013). This meeting will include new workshops and key lectures on primary and final exam topics, coded to the curriculum.
NIAA Workshops at GAT
The NIAA is offering trainees the chance to talk through their research ideas at GAT on 4 April. Delegates can book a slot to discuss their project with members of the NIAA Board and are welcome to submit specific questions in advance of the day. If you would like to register for one of these mini-workshops, then please click here.
The Anaesthetic Research Society's Spring Meeting
The Anaesthetic Research Society's Spring Meeting will be held on Thursday 11th and Friday 12th April in Oxford. Keynote lectures will be given by Dr A E Pickering, Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust, and Dr H Ashrafian, Reader in Cardiovascular Medicine and Honorary Consultant Cardiologist, University of Oxford. Full details about the event and how to register can be found here.
NIAA Research Week
We are delighted to announce a brand new 'week' long programme of events bringing together research courses from the ARS, BJA and HSRC and running from Monday 30 September to Thursday 3 October 2013. Click here for an outline programme. Further details to follow soon.
NELA - National Emergency Laparotomy Audit
The National Emergency Laparotomy Audit (NELA) is part of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP), overseen by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP). NCAPOP is a closely linked set of centrally-funded national clinical audit projects that collect data on compliance with evidence based standards, and provide local trusts with benchmarked reports on the compliance and performance. They also measure and report patient outcomes.
The audit aims to look at the structure, process and outcome measures for the quality of care received by patients undergoing emergency laparotomy. NELA will comprise of an Organisational Audit and a Patient Audit.
The project team began contacting NHS Trusts and Hospitals in early 2013 to request their participation in this audit. If your hospital or trust performs this procedure and you are interested in participating in the audit, would like to be kept up to date with latest developments or need further information please click here.
HSRC
Fourth HSRC UK Peri-operative Care Research Forum
A fourth successful UK Peri-operative Care Research Forum was held at the University Hospital Birmingham on Monday 21st January on the theme of translating preclinical into clinical anaesthesia research. The next forum will be held at the RCoA in London on Thursday 3rd October. Further information will be available on the NIAA and HSRC websites in due course.
QuARCs
The HSRC is working to establish a network of local Quality Audit and Research Coordinators (QuARCs) within every Trust to be a single point of contact for national audits, quality improvement projects, multicentre research and other academic issues. For more information, please visit the HSRC website. We are still missing details for a number of trusts, so if you haven't yet confirmed the details for your QuARC, please do get in touch.
National Audit Projects
NAP5
The fifth National Audit Project on Accidental Awareness during General Anaesthesia is now underway. For more information and for details on how to report a case of AAGA, please visit the NAP website. Results of a Baseline Survey into incidents of AAGA will be published in the BJA and Anaesthesia journals shortly.
NAP4
One of the key recommendations of the NAP4 report was that each Department of Anaesthesia should have a 'departmental airway lead'. This has been a long-standing recommendation of the Difficult Airway Society (DAS), and the Royal College of Anaesthetists' (RCoA) Council has now endorsed a strong recommendation that all departments should conform. The College is currently compiling a list of Department Airway Leads. An article with further details can be found in:
Issue 76 of the November Bulletin.
Call for proposals for NAP6
The Royal College of Anaesthetists requests those wishing to suggest a topic for the 6th National Audit Project of the Royal College of Anaesthetists to contact Dr Tim Cook.
As a guide we suggest the topic should be:
- important to patients
- important to anaesthetists
- currently incompletely studied in incidence or nature
The closing date for proposals is Thursday 28th February 2013.
Anaesthesia Cases
The AAGBI has launched Anaesthesia Cases, a free service for members which allows access to interesting, informative or notable cases in anaesthesia, critical care and pain. Users are able to search, submit and publish cases and it is the AAGBI's intention to build up a valuable online resource. If you are faced with a tricky case and want to see how others managed the same situation, please click here.
