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1 June 2022
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PelvEx 2024
John T. Jenkins1, Paul Sutton2
1. Consultant Colorectal Surgeon
Chair of Surgery
Lead Complex & Recurrent Cancer Service,
St. Mark's Hospital, London
Imperial College, London
Surgeon to the Royal Household
2. Consultant Colorectal, Pelvic, and Peritoneal Surgeon
Colorectal and Peritoneal Oncology Centre
The Christie NHS Foundation Trust
Chair ACPGBI Advanced Malignancy Subcommittee
DOI: https://doi.org/10.58974/bjss/azbc052
PelvEx 2024 was hosted and organized in London by the ACPGBI Advanced Malignancy Subcommittee and UKPEN. The Royal Institution provided the perfect venue, blending history with excellent facilities which ensured the meeting was a tremendous success. Nearly 300 delegates attended from all over the world, with this year’s meeting having a truly multi-disciplinary programme.
The first day included sessions on “R0 resection – How important is it really”, “How much is too much in exenteration surgery”, and “Mastering morbidity”. In addition, sessions on the “Consequences of exenteration surgery” including patient and nursing experiences, as well as discussion about sex and intimacy, and the psychological consequences of surgery. The day finished with a “Consultants Corner- Grey Heads on Green Shoulders” session discussing a number of diverse challenges encountered at different stages in clinical practice .
The second day began with the inaugural trainee prize presentation session for the now coveted Brunschwig Prize. A number of high quality abstracts were received and the six best (linked below this blog) were invited to deliver oral presentations. The quality was exceptional. This session was followed by sessions on “Research progress” and “Surgical techniques”, followed by an afternoon where the “Oncologists have their say” culminating with a “Global MDT”. The conference was live streamed to China and recorded for posterity.
Invited Commentary: Associations between adverse outcomes for surgical admissions and nurse understaffing – a longitudinal study
Petter Frühling, MD, PhD,1 and Patricia Tejedor, MD, PhD2
1. Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Unit, Department of Surgery, Department of Surgical Sciences, Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden.
2. University Hospital Gregorio Marañón, Colorectal Surgery Unit, Madrid, Spain
In a recent study published in BJS, Meredith1 and co-authors present their findings of the detrimental effects of nurse understaffing and adverse events for surgical patients. This, as the authors highlight, is a critical yet often overlooked problem that extends far beyond the National Health Service (NHS) in England. Although the paper’s conclusion that ‘understaffing’ is ‘associated with increased risks of a range of adverse events’ may appear obvious, the significance of the findings relies on its universal character – that it is a global problem that requires urgent attention.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has de facto identified a global shortage of healthcare workers, particularly nurses and midwives, who represent more than 50% of the current shortfall. While the shortage of doctors may be manageable, the understaffing of nurses poses a severe threat to health outcomes. In a large observational study, that included nine European countries and data from more than 420 000 patients, published in Lancet in 2014, it was noted that each increase of one patient per nurse was associated with a 7% increase in the likelihood of a surgical patient dying within 30 days of admission2.
Two recent reports from the International Council of Nurses (ICN) further emphasise the detrimental effects of nurse understaffing on patient outcomes, and urge readers to view this as a matter of global urgency. In Sustain and Retain in 2022 and Beyond3 the authors project the need to replace up to 13 million nurses globally in the coming years, reflecting alarming rates of nurse attrition driven by stress, burnout, absenteeism, and industrial action. The ICN’s 2023 follow-up report, Recover to Rebuild – Investing in the Nursing Workforce for Health System Effectiveness , calls for a coordinated global effort to establish a sustainable nursing workforce through a long-term, ten-year plan.
Surgical research in Plain English
Randomized controlled trial of plain English and visual abstracts for disseminating surgical research via social media
BJS started with the aim of of being a medium through which surgeons “can make our voice intelligibly heard”, according to Sir Rickman Godlee, President of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1913.
The aim of a recently published paper in BJS was to increase the engagement (defined compositely as the total number of replies, retweets, or likes on Twitter) of clinicians and patients in the communication of surgical research – part of the core values of BJS.