Euroanaesthesia 2025

Fatigue is increasingly recognised as a problem in Europe.  I’ve just spent 4 days in Lisbon at the Euroanaesthesia conference, which had 6000 delegates. Things started well with the President of every European National Society of Anaesthesiologists (NASC) signing the Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anaesthesiology 2.0.   This now includes a paragraph on fatigue which says:

Fatigue can severely impair staff performance and the delivery of safe patient care. All hospitals should have a Fatigue Management Policy and monitor its implementation.

This is the result of years of hard work by David Whitaker, who chairs the European Board’s patient safety committee, supported by Ioana Grigoras and me from the workforce working conditions and welfare committee.

There were several talks on fatigue at the conference.  Anne Marie Camilleri Podesta, President of NASC presented the results of a Europe-wide survey which we helped to design, and the European Board ran a session on fatigue, chaired by Olegs Sabelnikovs, from Latvia.  Fatigue got a mention in the session on workforce and generational perspectives in anaesthesia and hot topics in patient safety. It’s brilliant to hear people we’ve never met highlighting the problem for us as anaesthetists working in different countries with very different cultures, and for patients. I got several questions about my talk in the session on supporting healthcare workforce to improve patient safety, although the audience was much more select than the 3000 for the opening ceremony.

The UK documents published over the last year were much quoted, so I hope Saskia and Clare from HSSIB, Bernadette Dalton from the Society of Occupational Medicine, and Laura Pickup and Mark Young who led the work from the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors all had their ears burning! Next time we need them here in person so they’ll need sun cream for real burnt ears!

Work is going on in Romania, Malta, Croatia and Germany, and the European Patient Safety Foundation, with whom we have close links, are continuing their fight fatigue campaign. I chatted to enthusiastic trainees and consultants from all these countries, all doing different projects. The Romanian nurses have really taken the problem of fatigue to heart and in Germany, trainees are looking very seriously at rotas of 7 consecutive night shifts. The Acute Physicians in Germany invited one of the European Society Patient safety experts to talk to them about fatigue, so it’s spreading beyond Anaesthesia, or as they call in in Europe Anaesthesiology.

I made sure to invite as many as possible to the Healthcare Fatigue Forum on 4th Nov in Bristol and didn’t need to point out that the weather wouldn’t be a patch on the days of uninterrupted sun that Lisbon offered. However it does probably offer a similar number of hills and uneven pavements!

It’s a huge privilege to travel under the name of our joint work on fatigue. It will be brilliant to hear from colleagues, near and far, also working to improve the way healthcare manages fatigue.