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The role, aims and organisation of the 2017 IFOS World Congress

IFOS is a truly international organisation – indeed, its rules state that the Executive Committee must have representation from every continent. IFOS President, Chong Sun Kim, tells us more. Dear friends and colleagues, I am very pleased to welcome all...

Training reinvented: NHS staff embrace free VR education platform

A groundbreaking VR platform is transforming NHS training, offering immersive, cost-free simulation experiences to boost skills across multiple clinical fields. ENT is a specialty that demands precision, rapid decision-making and familiarity with complex anatomy, especially in emergency contexts such as...

The death of Attila the Hun, a 70s film and Japanese cartoons

The 6th century Gothic monk, Jordanes, tells us that Attila the Hun, the notorious and allegedly merciless barbarian (who was a prime mover in the fall of the Roman Empire), died of a nosebleed on his wedding night in 453...

Sniffing out the evidence – COVID-19 and loss of sense of smell and taste

Louis Pasteur once observed: “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” Professor Hopkins was certainly prepared when a few anecdotes of smell problems started to accumulate early in the pandemic’s course. Post-viral olfactory loss is nothing...

Not just the scissors: the story of Myron Metzenbaum

Myron Metzenbaum was born in Cleveland, Ohio (USA) in 1876, the fourth of nine children. As a young man, he worked in the family’s linen store, where his father was well known to be very kind to the less fortunate...

Getting It Right First Time in ENT

Andrew Marshall, a Consultant ENT Surgeon at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, visited 126 departments across England before publishing his recent ENT surgery national report for the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) programme. Here, he explains how identifying unwarranted...

European power women in otolaryngology: a focus on Laura Viani, Ireland’s first female otolaryngologist

Professor Laura Viani is a Consultant Otolaryngologist at Beaumont Hospital and Temple Street University Children’s Hospital and has been a member of Council of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland for the last 17 years. As the first female...

Simulation: human factors scenario training

It is said that surgical training has suffered as a result of a combination of factors – through the introduction of work time restrictions such as the European Working Time Directive (EWTD) [1], a limit on the number of years...

The role of metrics in studies of hearing and cognition

Introduction When perceiving sounds in real-world listening environments, older adults encounter several sources of degradation that can interfere with the perceptual process (Figure 1). Target signals (i.e. the sounds that a listener wants to focus on) have specific acoustic characteristics...