This week I attended the PeriopMan Anaemia conference, hosted at the Renaissance Hotel in Manchester City Centre. This was a half day conference focused, rather unsurprisingly, on the topic of anaemia and the impact that is has on perioperative care. For those of you that hadn’t heard of them, the Manchester Perioperative Medicine Society (PeriopMan), are a group based in Manchester with the established aim of bringing focus to collaborative working in perioperative care. Whilst they first started back in 2013, the society as it is now was launched back in 2016. They tend to have an annual conference in October and a further smaller conference at this time of year. To find out more information check out their website: https://www.periopman.co.uk/

I wanted to do some blog posts on topics that have particularly begun to interest me recently - those around medical education. Over recent months, partly through my postgraduate medical education course, I have steadily realised that I have gone through well over a decade of higher education without ever being properly taught how to learn. This is quite a situation to be in with a training program as long as ours, and with a career of lifelong learning still to come. I therefore though I would start by looking at a topic that has really revolutionised my own learning over the past few months. The topic is that of ‘spaced repetition’ and I really don’t think I can understate the impact that it has had on my own retention of certain information. ​

​Today I was able to attend the RAFT Winter Scientific Meeting, held at the RCOA. This meeting was a great opportunity for the representatives of all the regional trainee research networks (TRNs) to catch up on the events of the past year and look to the future. Despite the snowy weather providing some travel challenges for some of the speakers the day was packed with updates and useful information. I hope to use this blog post to highlight some of the great work currently or imminently going on for anyone interested in getting more involved in research, QI and audit work.