Editorial

| Natalie Silvey | Moon-Moon Majumdar |

Happy New Year and welcome to the January 2023 edition of the Difficult Airway Society EZine.

As we start 2023, we reflect on 2022 and a very special moment for DAS with the return to a face to face DAS ASM for the first time since the start of the pandemic. The world may have adapted brilliantly using technology for remote meetings and conferences but there is nothing quite like being back with colleagues again in person. A huge thank you to Dr Iftikhar Parvez and the organising committee in Newcastle for a fantastic meeting. We are already looking forward to DAS 2023 which is being held in Birmingham 29 November - 01 December so save the dates in your diary!

One of the highlights of the 2022 ASM was the awarding of the DAS Macewen medal to our wonderful Professor Ellen O’Sullivan. Ellen is a truly special individual for all she does for DAS and airway management education and she is a huge role model for us and many others. It was a very special moment to see her receive the medal and a huge congratulations from us for such an amazing achievement. DAS 2022 also saw the awarding of a DAS Professorship to Professor Cyprian Mendonca. Professor Mendonca has had a huge impact through his research and educational activities and contribution to airway management. Congratulations to Professor Mendonca and we look forward to your lecture at DAS 2023.

This edition of the e-zine kicks off the new year with a bang. We have the concluding part of our three-part educational series focusing on perioperative medicine. In this final part we have two fantastic articles focusing on the development of such services. Learning from others who have been through the process is crucial and we would love to hear about others experiences of this at a time when preoperative medicine is very much in the headlines.

This month’s clinical dilemma poses several challenges: a patient living with obesity, pregnancy and a rapidly progressing condition which needs urgent treatment all in one case. How would you manage such a patient?

How good are we at calculating the doses of local anaesthetic that our patients can

receive when undergoing an awake tracheal intubation? In this edition of the e-zine we have an article on a chart developed by a team at LNWH to improve patient safety in this important area of practice.

And if that wasn’t enough for one edition, we are taking at looking at the delivery of multidisciplinary airway training with the #AirwayHub initiative at University College London Hospital.

After the success of the DAS webinars in 2022 we are delighted to announce our first DAS webinar of 2023 which will be taking place on 2nd March 2023 on human factors. We have a fantastic panel for this webinar and will be announcing further dates and topics for future webinars very shortly. If you have any feedback or article contributions please get in touch with our editorial team by emailing ezine@das.uk.com or tag us on Twitter @dasairway or @dastrainees.

Moon-Moon Majumdar

Natalie Silvey

*If you missed the previous parts in the periop series, you can find them here and here!