From the early beginning of modern anesthesia in our country, the SARB was at your side organizing scientific meetings, supporting the education of residents, promoting research, as well as editing the “Acta Anaesthesiologica Belgica”. These challenges and our contribution to important consensus meetings inspired us to achieve our goals in patient care, education and research.

Today, your Society intends to further support you in the practice of our medical specialty. We will continue to provide you with information and postgraduate leaning opportunities, but we intend to do so in a much more interactive way.

In this time of COVID-19 outbreak, the Society for Anesthesia and Resuscitation of Belgium (SARB) would like to register the COVID-19 cases that are managed in the OR’s of Belgian Hospitals, including C-sections.

For that purpose, we would like to ask you to fill in the following questionnaire (one questionnaire for each managed patient, a downloadable version can be found at the following link), with as much information as available, paying attention to strictly respect patient anonymity. In order to link data to a particular patient anonymously, we ask you to attribute a reference number to each patient, using the following format: institution abbreviation followed by order number (e. g. first patient of CHR Citadelle Liege: chrliege1). Your personal data will also remain confidential, and the results will not be publicly available until this publication does not bypass official communication by hospitals. We will, however, need a contact person for each Institution participating into the study. This is the reason why we ask for a contact email address at the beginning of the survey. Should a publication emanate from the analysis of collected data, that contact person will be associated as a co-author of the publication. Today, your Society intends to further support you in the practice of our medical specialty. We will continue to provide you with information and postgraduate leaning opportunities, but we intend to do so in a much more interactive way.

Every year on 16th October WFSA supports anaesthesia providers the world over to celebrate their profession and have a bit of fun whilst doing it.

World Anaesthesia Day commemorates the birth of anaesthesia on 16th October 1846. When doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital demonstrated the use of ether for the first time on a patient. In doing so they changed surgery forever, proving it was possible for patients to undergo surgery without the torture of pain previously associated with it.

Despite nearly 170 years having passed since that first anaesthetic procedure and the countless breakthroughs that have succeeded it, nearly 5 billion people continue to lack access to safe anaesthesia practices. In the light of this on-going neglect, global awareness days like World Anaesthesia Day can be a powerful advocacy tool to mobilise political will, educate the general public and inforce achievements of the global anaesthesia community.