LEADING SURGICAL

EDUCATION

About BJS Academy

It is essential for surgeons to engage in life-long learning to provide patients with the best available treatments.

Divided into five sections, BJS Academy is an online education resource that supports the professional development of current and future surgeons worldwide by championing research and collaboration.

Continuing surgical education

Committing to a career in surgery means keeping abreast of medical and surgical progress throughout 20–30 years.

Continuing surgical education summarises advances in various subspecialties, as well as providing lectures and vodcasts on topics of interest. If you wish to pursue formal credentialling or educational training courses, you can find out more about the BJS Institute’s collaboration with the University of Edinburgh.

Widening participation in cardiothoracic healthcare: INSINC Insight

Kirstie Kirkley, Georgia R. Layton, Javeria Tariq, Heen Shamaz, Mostin Hu, Alana Atkinson, Deborah Harrington, Elizabeth Belcher, Jason Ali, Narain Moorjani, Farah Bhatti, Karen Booth

Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) within surgery is important.1 The recent Kennedy Review on Diversity and Inclusion, commissioned by the Royal College of Surgeons of England, made 16 recommendations to improve EDI in the surgical workforce.2 Cardiothoracic surgery in the UK lacks diversity, exemplified with only 13% of the consultant workforce being female, despite females accounting for 49% of UK doctors.3 One method of improving EDI in the specialty, is to focus on widening participation (WP) activities.

In the UK, WP activities and government policies aim to increase representation of lower socio-economic groups in higher education. Published schemes focus on peer-to-peer mentorship from medical to school students. The King’s College London scheme is a monthly seminar series offered to WP school students, publishing a 50% success rate of translation to successful application to medical school.4

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11 February 2025

ACPGBI 2024 BJS Prize Session: The empty pelvis syndrome: a core dataset from the PelvEx Collaborative

We are proud to present the BJS Prize session from the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain & Ireland's 2024 Annual Meeting, which was held 1 July to 3 July in Wales. The BJS prize winner was Charlie West for "The empty pelvis syndrome: a core dataset from the PelvEx Collaborative."

Lower GI Video

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6 February 2025

Young BJS

Dedicated to and managed by surgeons in training, Young BJS offers everything a trainee could need to supplement and expand upon their core learning.

Focusing on the importance of surgical research, it gives trainees the opportunity to read and critique research, design surgical projects and optimise their chances of being published in peer-reviewed journals.

Achievements and challenges after a century of parathyroid surgery

Mihai R.

BJS 2024; 111: znae268.

Endocrine

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27 January 2025

Risk-reducing mastectomy in mutation carriers

Zaborowski AM, Boland MR.

BJS 2024; 111: znae264.

Breast

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21 January 2025

Cutting edge blog

Globally recognised journals, BJS and BJS Open, deliver a wealth of quality materials surrounding surgical science and learning.

The Cutting edge blog offers commentary and opinion pieces about published papers, journal clubs and debates for regular readers of the Foundation’s journals, as well as summary digests of other recent surgical publications.

Comment on: Risk factors and protective measures for desmoid tumours in familial adenomatous polyposis: retrospective cohort study

Davide Serrano, Lucio Bertario

Correspondence to: Dr. Davide Serrano (email: davide.serrano@ieo.it)

Division of Cancer Prevention and Genetics

European Insitute of Oncology

Lower GI Guest blog

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7 February 2025

Oesophageal cancer awareness month 2025

Matthew Lee PhD FRCS

It is becoming increasingly common to dedicate days, or even months, to ‘health awareness’. These events should help people to learn about these conditions. From these, we can hope that people might learn about symptoms that help them get a diagnosis, or learn about new treatment options for their conditions. It also provides a focal point where we can come together as a community to recognise those impacted, and find ways to address these serious health conditions. It may even act as a clarion call, moving charities, governments, and individuals, to make efforts to fund and deliver research to further understand and improve outcomes for these conditions.

The BJS Academy, alongside BJS & BJS Open, feel it is an important part of our mission to contribute to these awareness months. So much research is published with enthusiasm, but then resides solely within the pages of a journal (or latterly, as a lonely PDF on a server). It is important to ensure that new information is shared with people who might find it useful. This is particularly important when it comes to conditions which currently have a poor prognosis, or may affect only a small number of people. With this in mind, our team will contribute to the online discussion for disease months by highlighting 2-3 papers from BJS and BJS Open, and sharing them across our social media channels. This will include a short summary and a link to the paper.

This move comes as part of our commitment to sharing key clinical research to support the knowledge of surgeons around the world, and to ensure our patients receive care informed by evidence of the highest possible standard.

Upper GI Guest blog

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5 February 2025

Scientific surgery

Designed to help the busy surgeon keep up to date, Scientific surgery provides succinct summaries of new and interesting information collated from leading surgical journals and digital media.

Randomized clinical trials

For all clinical surgeons

Surgical science

For those interested in the science behind surgery

Social media

A monthly digest of the best digital material

Surgery for all

For non-surgeons

Surgical news

Exploring topics relevant to both surgeons and people without medical training, Surgical news is accessible to everyone.

Many patients seek reliable information on the best treatments for surgical diseases, whilst others have a general interest in reading quality articles about surgeons and surgical practice.

View from the coffee room…LARPing ChatGPT

Virve Koljonen MD, PhD

LARP, live action role play, is immersive role-playing where participants physically and mentally/emotionally portray their characters, interact in real-world settings, and shape the story through improvisation. There are not many chances for surgeons to LARP during professional hours. Well, other than occasionally LARP internist, when someone asks about medicines.

Medical research and writing have changed after introduction to LLMs, large language models, such as ChatGPT (OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA) launched Nov 30, 2022. LLMs employ neural network and have been trained to understand and generate human language and produce human-like responses1.

General Guest blog

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3 February 2025

A view from the coffee room… on communication in the OR

Virve Koljonen MD, PhD

I maintain a shortlist of stupid or dare I say idiotic statements given by hospitals top administration to the newspapers. A decade ago, we were in a similar situation as today: a lack of nurses. The solution to this shortage was to bring in nurses from other countries. So far this sounds great, but there is more to this. In the newspapers I learned that the nurses were to be placed in the OR. Again fine, we need to do operations and operate more. The next sentence blew my mind: these nurses were placed in the OR since they did not have to learn Finnish, because no one talks in the OR.

So, basically everyone in the OR, surgeons, anesthetists, nurses and orderlies, work in total silence; maybe listen to radio, but no talking. We don't say a word. Maybe we communicate with hand gestures or perform pantomime. To me, this shows that the hospital administration does not understand what kind of work is done in the OR and especially how the work is actually done. Communication is of the utmost importance in the OR. One of the first things I learned in OR about communication, was that anyone can and should speak out if they notice shortcomings in sterility. This is really, really important.

General Guest blog

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13 December 2024

BJS Academy team

The talented team behind the Academy bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to their roles.

The Academy website is managed by IT partners, River Valley Technologies, a Content Management team coordinated by ACS Global and a BJS Academy Board managed by Jonothan Earnshaw.

Director

Jonothan Earnshaw manages and coordinates the activities of BJS Academy.

BJS Academy Board

Supporting the Director, this team creates the Academy’s educational resources.

Management team

This team supports the Director to deliver the strategy and manage the delivery of the Academy.