Recent Events….

WPOMS Annual Conference 2022: Back face to face with a bang!

Thursday 24th November 2022

WPOMS made their face to face come back at The Village Hotel, Cardiff. With 157 delegates in attendance, the conference room did become a bit of a squeeze especially when Mr Motivator took the stage and got us all up and moving!

A fantastic line up for the day including our own President Dr Tony Funnell giving a brilliant summary of the POM updates this year - feedback has been that just this lecture would count as your CPD for the year! Guest speakers Dr John Whittle and Dr Rhydian Jones gave insightful talks on the work within prehabilitation - an area we all had lots of questions on and how we could implement programmes within our practice.

But a real highlight of the day had to be a special visit from Mr Motivator himself - 90’s legend and TV star who has now turned his ambition to promoting and educating the importance of fitness and prehabilitation prior to major surgery. A cause close to his heart and one that he is obviously extremely passionate about. I think everyones average HR raised about 20 bpm during the talk and we all came out inspired to do more for our patients and ourselves!

We were very fortunate to have Professor Jugdeep Dhesi and Dr Jude Partridge speak about their work with the POPS (Perioperative Medicine for Older Persons Service) and how they set this up/implemented this at Guys & St Thomas’s. With all the brilliant work going on with out own POPs teams in Wales, this was a very relevant and timely talk and we are really grateful for their time!

The afternoon workshops were also jam packed with an expert session on perioperative anaemia chaired by Dr Caroline Evans and Dr Claire Dunstan, shared decision making and a POPs session also proved popular with delegates. But the CPET demonstration really took it up a notch with our own Welsh anaesthetic trainee Dr Hannah Saitch standing in at the last moment and blowing all functional threshold power records to smithereens!

A fantastic day - thanks to the sponsors, organisers, speakers and delegates! We can’t wait to be back next year!

WPOMS: ‘ALL THINGS PERIOPERATIVE ANAEMIA’

Virtual Conference - Monday 19th April 2021

We had a fantastic day when we teamed up with EBPOM and TopMedTalk to discuss ‘All Things Anaemia’ - who knew there was so much to say!

Unfortunately, due to COVID restrictions, we were unable to hold this conference face to face as planned but the online platform enable a massive 876 delegates to join us from all corners of the globe including New Zealand, Kenya, Canada and of course good old Wales!

This conference really showed off the fantastic work around anaemia going on in Wales - from the slick IV iron clinics running in Wrexham (Dr Neil Agnew) to the brilliant antenatal input at UHW (Dr Lucy De Lloyd).

Some guest appearances from the authors of the PREVENTT trial published in the Lancet last year was a real highlight (Prof Andy Klein and Prof Toby Richards) and an excellent debate between Toby and Dr James Plumb got us all thinking about out perioperative iron practice.

Engagement from delegates was fantastic with questions being asked via the Slido platform and taking part in the opinion polls. Thank you also to all the brilliant trainee abstract submissions which were of an excellent standard and congratulations to Dr John Kirby for winning the oral presentation prize.

A really fantastic event and we can’t wait for the next one! Thanks again to Dr Caroline Evans, Prof Monty Mythen and the EBPOM team for making the day such a success!

Ellie & Isra

PFSD - Perioperative Medicine

An excellent day at UHW for Welsh trainees who have passed their Final FRCA. These Post Fellowship Days aim to build upon and explore areas of interest in a bit more detail with talks from experts in the field.

We were very lucky with this course with some fantastic speakers including Dr Cat Williams from UCL speaking about her specialist area of interest - Surgery School and Rehabilitation. It was really interesting to hear how POM was being developed in England and the use of the MDT to prepare patients for surgery and engage them in their surgical pathway. The rest of the day was equally interesting as the world of POM continues to develop and work within Wales is growing and gaining momentum. The programme for the day was as follows:

• Surgery School and Prehab, Dr Cat Williams (UCL)

• Alcohol Cessation, Lauren Idowu (Principal Health Promotion Specialist)

• Updates in peri-operative medicine, Dr Tony Funnel

• Peri-operative anaemia, Dr Caroline Evans

• Interesting CPET cases, Dr Richard Davies

• PQIP project, Dr Sara Churchill

Of particular interest were the new tools available for alcohol screening - it was discussed how we, as trainees, can have these discussions with patients either in pre-assessment clinic or during their admission and screen using the Audit C tool.

Audit C Tool - Alcohol Screening

It was also great to hear a bit more about PQIP and how we can get involved with this across Wales. For more information on how to take this forward in your own hospital, please email welsh.poms@gmail.com.

As always thank you to the PFSD team and special mention to Paul Carter, Charlotte Oliver and Nadine Jones who worked so hard put on such an interesting POM day for free!

Other Opportunities to Get Involved…