Dear Neuroanaesthesia SIG members,
I hope that you have all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year period with your friends and family and are well rested for the year to come. This is my first newsletter as Chair and would like to thank Kathryn Hagen for her work with the SIG in the last couple of years and I hope that the executive and I can continue the same.
This year from the Neuroanaesthesia SIG, we are excited to hold a stream at the ANZCA ASM on Wednesday May 1, 2019 entitled "In the stroke of time" which will focus on advancing our knowledge on clot retrieval from translating animal models of stroke, to protecting the ischaemic penumbra to what lies in the future with stroke research (co-ordinated by Doug Campbell). We also look forward to a session at the ASA NSC in Sydney in October on preventing neurological complications with speakers talking on spinal cord monitoring, vasospasm and autoregulation. I am sure that these sessions will be thought provoking and highly relevant to our current practice.
The SIG executive is also currently planning for meetings in 2020 – namely a stand-alone combined neurosciences meeting with the CICM Neurocritical Care SIG (in early 2020, location TBC), ANZCA ASM in Perth (May) and Combined NZSA/ASA meeting in Wellington (October). To help us facilitate our planning for these meetings, we would love to hear from you as to what you would be interested in us organising for you, or if you would like to contribute to the sessions. Your feedback would be most appreciated through the following survey link or directly to our SIG secretariat Kirsty O’Connor.
We would also like to let you know that our colleagues at Macquarie University are running their single day Neuroanaesthesia Simulation Course on May 25, 2019 and September 22, 2019 (as part of the ASA NSC). The course is based on the United Kingdom's One Brain Neuroanaesthesia Simulation and is taught by a local multidisciplinary faculty covering scenarios relating to neuroanaesthesia emergencies. Both technical and non-technical skills are covered in the scenarios and will stimulate both novice and experienced neuroanaesthetists. This course was recently run as part of the joint ANZCA-RACS ASM in 2018. The day aims to improve your ability to more safely evaluate and prioritise the management of patients with such conditions a raised intracranial pressure, traumatic brain injury and emergency interventional neuroradiology including anaesthesia for ischaemic stroke. The day will include four simulation activities which will be interspersed with short sessions on cardiac arrest and ALS in Neurosurgery, crisis resource management, neuro ICU and the use of external ventricular drainage (EVD). This course has ANZCA approval for CPD for points based on 8 hours (16 points), pre-reading and will also cover two mandatory emergency responses (Cardiac Arrest and major Haemorrhage).
If you have any further interest, please click here to visit their website or email the simulation co-ordinator Wanda McDermott.
Finally, the Neuroanaesthesia SIG is pleased to announce that ANZCA, the Australian Society of Anaesthetists (ASA) and the Society for Neuroscience in Anesthesiology and Critical Care (SNACC) have collaborated to establish a Joint Scientific Travel Award. The purpose of the travel award is to facilitate attendance to a SNACC annual meeting by a trainee by offsetting cost allowing the recipient the opportunity to present a poster. It also has been established to fostering international collaborations and relationships between organisations. The award consists of a financial award (US$500) and presentation of a certificate during the annual meeting. To qualify, the candidate must be a trainee from Australia or New Zealand at the time of the annual meeting and must be the presenting author of an abstract accepted for presentation (as scored by a judicial committee) at the SNACC annual meeting. The recipient must attend the SNACC annual meeting (September 12-14, 2019, Phoenix, Arizona) to receive their award and certificate. Abstracts will open soon and a link will be available from www.snacc.org, through our SIG and ACE websites. For more details in the interim, please contact our secretariat Kirsty O’Connor
Please take the time to complete the survey as this would help us to shape our future activities on your behalf and we look forward to seeing you in Kuala Lumpur or Sydney later this year,
Kindest regards,
Dr Veronica Gin
Neuroanaesthesia SIG Chair
