August 2020 Central School Novice course

This is a mandatory course aimed at those trainees who will be doing their Anaesthetic block in August 2020 in the North Central. This will include -  

·       Core Anaesthetic Trainees (CT1s)  

·       ACCS Anaesthetics CT2s (doing Anaesthetics in August 2020) 

·       ACCS EM trainees (doing Anaesthetics in August 2020) 

·       ICM trainees (doing Anaesthetics in August 2020).   

Course structure:

Given the current situation, we are having to run the course remotely due to social distancing regulations. Our plan is to deliver the course over 4 days with some pre-recorded material you can watch in your own time:

Day 1: Wednesday 12th August

Day 2: Tuesday 18th August

Day 3: Wednesday 26th August

Day 4: Tuesday 1st September

The general structure of the days will be: 

Mornings: All the lectures will be pre-recorded, so you can watch them whenever it suits you, but these will need to be viewed before the afternoon sessions for maximal benefit.

Afternoons:  There will be ‘Zoom’ sessions in the afternoon. We thought to keep this from 13:30 each day, so as to avoid confusion. 

·      This will be a mixture of facilitated small group discussions on some of the days, followed by more general discussions to reflect on the lectures.

You should get 4 days of study leave to cover the course and departments will release you to ‘attend’ the sessions. If you are doing a long day then most departments will release you for the day but expect you back to cover the evening shift. Please let rota organisers and college tutors know of study leave requests ASAP if this is the case. 

Pre-course work:

We will expect you all to do a little bit of pre-course work for Days 1 & 2, in order to keep the sessions a little bit more interactive. We will send details as soon as we can.

Locally delivered teaching:

There will be some practical skills stations which will be delivered locally in your base hospital. We have liaised with College Tutors to help us to organise these sessions.

The programme covers the Initial Assessment of Competencies (IAC) taken from the RCoA CCT in Anaesthetics curriculum – Basic Level Training (Annex B), with a few additional sessions deemed relevant to this early stage of training. These competencies are also required to be signed off by ACCS and ICM trainees and are included in the relevant specialty training curriculum documents.   

The course is designed to get everyone to an equivalent baseline to feel more prepared clinically. There will be some topics which we do not cover, but by teaching you the basics you will have something to build upon during your theatre sessions.   

How to sign up

​You should receive an invitation email from HEE with a link to sign up via Synapse. Any issues then please get in touch with us.

If you have any questions then please get in touch. This is the first time we will be running the course in this format so please bear with us.

Look forward to meeting you all virtually in August!  

Kind regards, 

Dr Bindiya Varma and Dr Elizabeth Cervi 

Consultant Anaesthetists  

Zoom link