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Surgical technology and operating room safety failures: lessons from vascular and general surgery

Background – surgical technology and otolaryngology An estimated 234 million major surgical procedures are performed annually worldwide. This requires the interaction of multidisciplinary teams with varying contributions of surgical technology and therefore makes surgical procedures prone to multiple sources of...

Ronald G Macbeth – the instigator of BACO

The structure of BACO has changed dramatically since the first conference in 1963, but the fundamental elements of academic excellence, instructional sessions and social events have been common threads. Andrew Freeland, who worked with Ronald Macbeth, the instigator of BACO,...

Communicating with patients in 
‘Plain English’

Physicians have long been accused of using unnecessarily complicated language and impenetrable jargon as a way of maintaining their status, prestige and high earnings-potential, bamboozling the public and excluding them from meaningful discussion as part of what George Bernard Shaw...

Reflections on educational gatherings in the COVID era

The COVID pandemic has brought disruption and uncertainty for the organisers of medical conferences. ENT and audiology have always thrived on a healthy exchange of views and the sharing of knowledge across subspecialties and across national boundaries. Ray Clarke asked...

Monitored safe medical practice: minimising patient harm will reduce medical negligence bill for the NHS

Patrick Bradley ruminates on a celebrated career in ENT head and neck surgery and suggests that increasing the possibility of positive outcomes to contemporary patient safety initiatives by the NHS must involve efforts to develop an enthusiastic contented workforce willing...

Experience on the front line

21st January 2021 Back to basics Yesterday I went right back to where my medical career began. I grew up in Germany, bilingual. A prerequisite to studying medicine in Germany is that applicants have to spend two months working as...

Pre-clinical development of magnetic delivery of therapy to middle and inner ears

Why are we developing this technology? A key problem in drug delivery is getting the therapy to the right place in the body, which is especially challenging for targets that are small, deep and are protected or surrounded by anatomical...

Staying safe during endoscopic ear surgery

There is growing interest in using rigid endoscopes rather than traditional operative microscopes to perform transcanal middle ear surgery. Rigid endoscopy provides a high resolution, wide-angle view of the tympanic cavity through minimally invasive surgical portals. In this article, Elliott...

Cochlear implants: recipient stories

The most powerful evidence for the remarkable achievements made with cochlear implants over 40 years comes from the life-changing, personal stories of those who have benefited from the technology. James Rylance I first noticed a problem with hearing when I...

Practising surgery in a war zone: an interview with Dr Volodymyr Melnyk

It is now nine months since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine commenced in late February 2022, with Putin announcing a “special military operation” to “denazify and demilitarise” Ukraine. The rest of the world, however, saw it for what it...