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Is one glass of wine on call safe?

It’s a standard question for those about to sit a Specialist Training (ST) interview; you are on call and you call a senior colleague in to perform an operation. You smell alcohol on the breath of the surgeon, so what...

Academic BACO 2015

Putting together the academic programme for BACO is a monumental task. Academic Chairman Shakeel Saeed and Peter Andrews, the Academic Secretary of the conference, tell us how to make it a success. Conference season is nearly upon us, and Liverpool...

The James Lind Alliance – involving patients and their health professionals jointly in setting priorities for research

In a world of patient-reported outcomes and patient-centred care, patient-centred research must also be considered. That is where the James Lind Alliance (JLA) comes in, as Caroline Whiting explains below. Through Priority Setting Partnerships (PSPs), it allows patients, their carers...

Optimising hearing aid processing for music appreciation

Hearing aid manufacturers’ main focus has, up until recently, been improvement of speech intelligibility. Today’s hearing aid users have much broader demands however and often cite improved music perception as a key outcome or goal. Drs Tish Ramirez and Rebecca...

Sugammadex

Scott Russell is an anaesthetist with an almost unrivalled experience of complex head and neck surgery, and has seen all manner of new ideas come and go. However, in this article he describes a new pharmaceutical agent that is already...

Emerging robotic systems for head and neck surgery

As of December 2020, seven robotic surgical systems have received approval for use in different jurisdictions, and many more task-specific robots are in the pipeline. Jack Faulkner takes us through what’s on the horizon for head and neck cancer surgery....

Tonsillitis and tonsillectomies: where do we go from Paradise?

Landmark Paper: Paradise JL, Bluestone CD, Bachman RZ, et al. Efficacy of tonsillectomy for recurrent throat infection in severely affected children – results of parallel randomized and nonrandomized clinical trials. N Engl J Med 1984;310(11):674-83. The Paradise paper on tonsillectomy...

Per-Ingvar Brånemark: father of osseointegration

The application of osseointegration has been central to the development of both bone-anchored hearing aids and dental implants. But how did it all come about? Per-Ingvar Brånemark (1929–2014). Image Johan Wingborg. Many hearing-impaired patients owe a great debt of gratitude...

Leadership challenges in the world 
of AQP and accreditation – learning from experience

The words ‘choice and competition’, ‘any qualified provider (AQP)’ and ‘accreditation’ have irrevocably become part of audiology jargon in the last two years in England. Commissioners who chose ‘Adult Hearing Aid Services for age-related hearing loss’ have begun the process...