SCATA - UK Society for Computing and Technology in Anaesthesia

SCATA Members Newsletter February 2023

Dear SCATA Member

Annual Scientific Meeting 2023

After a few quiet months over the winter break, we're pleased to announce that we have a date and venue for the the 2023 ASM.

We're going back to Glasgow, after a successful meeting there in 2017.

The date for your diary is Monday 26-June 2023.

The venue is the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Glasgow.

This is a city centre venue, just a ten-minute walk from the Central Station.

We're working on the programme, but the theme of the meeting will be "Digital Care Records in Anaesthesia - Past, Present, Future"

There will be the usual Free Paper session with prizes for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd best papers presented or co-authored by a trainee, as judged by three SCATA committee members.

It's hoped that we can invite a guest speaker from the US as part of our speaker exchange programme.

Online Booking for the meeting will open shortly but feel free to apply for study leave as the venue is booked and deposit paid.

We're also hoping that we can livestream at least some of the sessions, venue technology and WiFi permitting.

STA Speaker Exchange

SCATA Trainee Member James Selby took advantage of aforementioned STA Speaker Exchange Agreement to visit Las Vegas for the STA meeting last month.

You can read about James' trip on the SCATA blog.

Expert Panel report

On Friday 17th February, the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee reported Government progress on digitising the NHS was rated ‘inadequate’ by the independent Expert Panel, with the report concluding the Government is making inadequate progress on vital commitments to digitise the NHS. SCATA Chairman JP Lomas contributed to one of the focus groups used to put together the report.

Commitments evaluated by the Expert Panel include the delivery of integrated health and care records, the roll-out of the NHS app and ensuring a workforce had the necessary digital skills.

The rating casts severe doubts on the Government’s ability to ensure that health and social care systems have the digital foundations they need to meet the challenges they face.

The Expert Panel found that key Government commitments on workforce and the use of patient information were either not met or were not on track to be met. The Panel found that overall progress towards improving the digital capabilities of the NHS was too slow, and often lacked support and funding. The experts concluded that social care was often missed out in commitments, stifling progress across the health and care system.

The Expert Panel notes its concern that Ministers’ ambition to digitise the NHS will not succeed without an effective workforce strategy to train, recruit and retain sufficient specialised digital staff.

HL7 Devices Working Group

Work continues in the Devices to group to prepare for changes in FHIR v5. Recently, due to health issues, Martin Hurrell has had to take a back seat but is hopeful that work can begin on the FHIR IG for the intra-operative phase of anaesthesia care soon. Martin and Grant are hoping to present the first phase of the work on the IG at the ASM in Glasgow in June.

SNOMED Anesthesia CRG

Grant missed the meeting in January, but the meeting notes are available here.

Committee Meeting

The SCATA committee met on zoom on 29th on January. On the to-do list was to file SCATA's accounts with the Charity Commission and to complete the access to the Charity's COIF account with the CCLA. The former is now complete, the latter is in progress, pending requirement for "wet" signatures on a lengthy document given to the trustees by the CCLA.

Open Standards Working Group

With the hiatus in activity on the FHIR IG, we didn't schedule a working group meeting this year, but will likely be scheduling one between now and June. It may be on zoom rather than F2F but we'll keep all the options open.

Slack

We're delighted to have been accepted onto Slack's charity programme, giving all SCATA members full and unlimited use of our Slack instance at https://scatauk.slack.com - all members are very welcome to join. Contact [email protected] for more details or if you need help accessing this membership benefit.

With best wishes

J P Lomas, Chairman

Grant Forrest, President

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