British Limb Reconstruction Society (BLRS) update

Simon Britten, President Elect of the British Limb Reconstruction Society

The BLRS educational committee are busy working on the content of the subspecialty slot at the BOA Congress in September. This follows hard on the heels of a really excellent BLRS Annual Conference held in March this year, hosted by our friends and colleagues Niall Breen and Luke Ogonda in Belfast. There were several outstanding international guest speakers, including Vaida Glatt from San Antonio, Texas (the biomimetic haematoma as a scaffold), Leo Donnan from Melbourne (complex foot deformity), Mauritz Laubscher from Cape Town (titanium cages for segmental bone defects) and Michael Wagels from Brisbane (3D-printed bioresorbable regenerative implants). The programme was also admirably supported by other notable experts in their field from the UK and Ireland. Gone are the days when we all just sat around and talked about frames! Congratulations to Niall, Luke and colleagues for such an excellent educational experience. The social highlights were the Titanic Museum and the appearance of the DeLorean DMC-12 sports car/time travel machine from the Back to the Future film franchise. We were also delighted that Deborah Eastwood was able to attend as an invited guest and speaker in her role as BOA President.

At the AGM, the membership supported the proposal to reduce the Presidential term from two years to one year, in line with other subspecialty societies and the BOA, with the aim of improving throughput on the committee and encouraging diversity in its widest sense, maximising the number of colleagues who participate in the development of the BLRS as an organisation and as a charity.

Again, on the educational side, we are hoping to improve collaboration with BOTA and develop a series of sessions on limb reconstruction for the FRCS(Orth) examination. The BLRS continues to support two slots on the BOA Future Leaders programme, and travel bursaries for our consultants, trainees and nursing/ AHP members. We are continuing to sponsor and badge courses in limb reconstruction nationally. In addition, we are looking to fund travelling fellows to the UK from other countries on an annual basis and we are also developing research grants – details of these to follow on the BLRS website https://blrs.org.uk/. We are completing a Delphi study to determine research priorities in limb reconstruction, led by Simon Graham, with results to follow.

The BLRS welcomes applications for membership in the following categories – consultants, trainees, nursing/AHP, and overseas.