Past events
ANZCA ASM 2018
The ANZCA ASM recently held in Sydney had one of the largest programs of airway workshops outside of the dedicated Airway Management SIG meetings. Five separate groups taught CICO management to almost 180 participants over all five days of the conference.
An additional twelve workshops were held on the Monday, successfully teaching awake fibreoptic intubation, nasendoscopy skills and high flow nasal oxygen use. Masterclasses on the paediatric airway and comple airway surgery also received good feedback from participants. The Sydney Clinical Skills and Simulation Centre ran two workshops on
obstetric emergencies, with full-scale simulations of airway crises.
The lecture sessions during the conference were well attended, with the only problem being the combined session with our surgical colleagues needing to find a larger venue to accommodate all attendees. The SIG session had a combination of some of our more experienced members, with Professor André Van Zundert discussing the use of videolaryngoscopy when using a suprglottic airway and Dr Paul Baker looking at ways of improving our practice across a range of topics. Dr Yasmin Endlich presented on the use of ultrasound in airway assessment and management and Dr Kar-Soon Lim presented a simple method of assessing and documenting mask ventilation success that could easily become the Lim scale alongside the Cormack-Lehane system.
There were also airway sessions for trainees as well as focus group sessions on the paediatric airway, the airway in burns surgery and in trauma and more than a dozen posters that involved airway management.
Overall, the meeting was a great success. This was in no small part to the many individuals who put great effort into ensuring that airway management was a central theme of the conference.
Dr Drew Heffernan
Future events
Airway Management SIG meeting, Kuala Lumpur, 2019
The Airway Management SIG meeting will be held as a satellite meeting to the ANZCA ASM in Kuala Lumpur 2019. Plans for the workshop component of this meeting are taking shape under the guidance of Dr Dane Blackford and Dr Linda Beckmann. Another packed practical program is lined up which will include fibreoptics, nasendoscopy, CICO emergency response training, Voretx and case discussion. Watch this space and get in early with the leave form!
Dates: Airway SIG meeting April 27-28, 2019, workshops for ASM and Airway Management SIG April 29, 2019
ASM program April 30-May 3, 2019
For further information, please click here to contact the SIG secretariat. 
Antarctica 2018
Three New South Wales anaesthetists are convening one of the more unusual anaesthetic conferences in 2018. Titled “Journey to Antarctica: Anaesthesia at the Extreme”, the meeting is being held on board the MV Explorer, a National Geographic icebreaker ship sailing from Ushuaia in Argentina to the Antarctic peninsula on November 28. Invited speakers include Professor Mike Grocott and Dr Denny Levett who are both well known to Australian anaesthetic audiences. Mike is Professor of anaesthesia and critical care medicine at the University of Southampton and Denny is a consultant in perioperative medicine and critical care at Southampton University Hospital. Between them there is a wealth of experience in extreme altitude physiology, perioperative medicine, diving medicine and airway expertise. Continuing the extreme environment theme is another invited speaker, Dr Michael Barratt. He is a NASA astronaut and physician with a particular interest in adaptive physiology and human performance associated with weightlessness and fractional gravity, along with intersections with other extreme environments. Specific airway topics in the program include an update on THRIVE and high flow nasal oxygen and addition to a series of CICO workshops. Please click here for further information.
WAMM 2019
The second World Airway Management meeting will be held in Amsterdam in November 13-16, 2019. An organising committee have already confirmed the venue and conference organiser, and discussions about the program are in progress. An international committee will be formed and organisations with a special interest in airway management will be contacted and encouraged to attend. The Airway Management SIG will be invited to make a presence in the WAMM Airway Village.
