The annual Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCSEd) SAS and LED Surgeons' and Dentists' Conference returned to Birmingham on 18 September, bringing together clinicians from across the UK for a day focused on career progression, patient safety and innovation. The conference hall was full of enthusiastic delegates, in fact this event was fully subscribed with few doctors on waiting list!
The conference programme was guided by feedback received from last years’ successful event and our aim was to improve the delegates’ experience further. While the formal programme covered a broad range of topics, a common theme emerged throughout the day: SAS and LED clinicians are no longer simply an important part of the healthcare workforce. They are increasingly central to service delivery, leadership, education and improvement, and their development represents an investment in the future of the profession itself.
Opening the conference, Mr Majid Mukadam, Chair of the SASLED Committee and RCSEd Council Member and Prof. Kartik Iyengar, welcomed the delegates before Ms Anna Paisley, Vice-President of RCSEd, reflected on the history and global influence of the College. With more than 34,000 members worldwide, she highlighted the College's role in shaping surgical standards, education, governance and assessment across the profession.
Importantly, her message focused not only on what the College could do for SAS and LED clinicians, but also on what SAS and LED clinicians could contribute to the College.
Beyond Clinical Practice: Getting Involved
One of the strongest messages of the morning was the breadth of opportunities available to SAS and LED doctors and dentists through engagement with RCSEd.
Ms Paisley outlined following key opportunities for SAS LED surgeons at the college:
Teaching and education
Specialty boards and working groups
Surgical Advisors' networks
Mentoring programmes
College committees and Council representation
The benefits extend well beyond curriculum vitae enhancement. Active involvement can support appraisal and revalidation, demonstrate leadership, create opportunities for networking and influence, and enable clinicians to contribute directly to the future direction of surgery and dentistry.
Building on this theme, Professor Phil Turner, Vice-President of RCSEd, discussed opportunities to contribute as assessors and accreditors. These roles include accreditation of:
Educational courses
Training programmes
Fellowships
Training centres
Educational resources
For many SAS and LED clinicians, these opportunities represent an important avenue for professional development while drawing upon their extensive clinical experience and specialist expertise.
Making Sense of the Portfolio Pathway
Career progression remains one of the most frequently discussed topics within the SAS and LED community, and the Portfolio Pathway featured prominently throughout the conference.
Mr Gaurav Kulkarni provided a particularly practical and honest account of his own successful Portfolio Pathway journey. His presentation moved beyond broad principles and focused on the day-to-day realities of constructing a successful application.
His most important observation was that the first challenge is often psychological rather than procedural.
The Portfolio Pathway can appear overwhelming when viewed in its entirety. However, meticulous planning, breaking the process into manageable tasks, maintaining a structured checklist and steadily accumulating evidence prospectively can transform what initially appears to be an insurmountable undertaking into an achievable goal.
Mr Kulkarni repeatedly emphasised the importance of:
Understanding the specialty curriculum in detail
Becoming familiar with Specialty Specific Guidance (SSG)
Identifying suitable verifiers and referees early
Maintaining organised evidence portfolios
Working incrementally and consistently over time
These themes were explored further during the afternoon workshop on Portfolio Pathway evidence gathering and submission. Faculty members shared their own experiences of planning, collecting and presenting evidence, offering practical insights that many delegates found invaluable.
The recurring message was clear: preparation, organisation and persistence matter just as much as clinical expertise.
Learning From Harm
The second major theme of the conference was patient safety.
Ms Michelle Stafford, Head of Safety and Learning at NHS Resolution, explored how organisations can learn more effectively from incidents of patient harm. Her presentation highlighted the importance of openness, transparency and early engagement with patients and families following adverse events.
The evidence presented suggested that approaches grounded in honesty, learning and a duty of candour can improve both organisational learning and patient experience.
She also highlighted the value of NHS Resolution resources, including national litigation analyses and thematic safety reports, as tools for identifying recurring themes and focusing quality improvement work.
This systems-based perspective was continued by Mrs Claire Morgan, Chair of the RCSEd Patient Safety Committee, who discussed implementation of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF).
Drawing on personal experience, she outlined the rationale behind the framework and its focus on learning rather than blame.
Several statistics served as a sobering reminder of the scale of the challenge. Patient harm remains common across healthcare systems, and avoidable harm continues to result in significant morbidity and mortality each year.
Mrs Morgan described four key pillars underpinning the framework:
Compassionate engagement with patients, families and staff
Systems-based learning
Considered and proportionate responses
Supportive oversight
The session resonated strongly with delegates, particularly given the influential role many SAS and LED clinicians play as long-standing members of clinical teams with deep organisational knowledge.
Resilience, Innovation and Artificial Intelligence
The Innovate and Thrive session shifted the focus towards professional resilience and emerging technologies.
In what was arguably one of the most memorable sessions of the day, Mr Mohammed Belal, Consultant Urological Surgeon and President-Elect of BAUS, shared a deeply personal account of recovery following a serious cycling accident that resulted in life-changing spinal injuries.
What could have been simply a story of adversity became a compelling reflection on resilience, perspective and personal growth.
His experience as a patient, he reflected, had profoundly shaped his understanding of healthcare and made him both a better surgeon and a more compassionate clinician.
The session provided a powerful reminder that professional development does not always come through formal training. Some of the most important lessons emerge from life's unexpected challenges.
The conference then turned towards one of the most rapidly evolving areas of medicine.
Dr Joseph Alderman, NIHR Clinical Lecturer in AI and Digital Health and an Anaesthetic and Intensive Care Consultant, explored the opportunities and risks associated with artificial intelligence in healthcare.
Rather than focusing solely on technological potential, his presentation emphasised the importance of understanding limitations, governance requirements and unintended consequences.
The message was balanced and pragmatic: AI is likely to have a transformative impact on healthcare, but clinicians must remain actively involved in ensuring these tools are deployed safely, ethically and in ways that genuinely benefit patients.
Turning Ideas into Action
Our popular interactive workshops were expertly conducted in the afternoon session, covering Portfolio Pathway development, research and academic publishing, and achieving Specialist Grade appointments.
As highlighted earlier, practical tips and pitfalls were explored further during the Portfolio Pathway workshop.
Particularly valuable were discussions around building academic portfolios. Faculty members encouraged delegates to start by reading broadly, identifying emerging areas of interest and engaging with research incrementally. Practical suggestions included joining the NIHR, undertaking Good Clinical Practice training, pursuing research methodology courses and seeking collaborative opportunities actively.
Meanwhile, the Specialist Grade workshop explored evidence gathering across leadership, education, research, audit and quality improvement domains. An important concept emerging from the discussion was what faculty described as building "trifecta" of compelling evidence for each domain:
Feedback
Reflection
Evidence
Across all workshops, there were lively discussions and opportunity to ask questions with more emphasis on practical advice.
The day was rounded off by Mr Arjun Tekhar, National Director of the RCSEd’s Regional Surgical Advisors’ Network, reflecting his local experience of helping SAS Surgeons attain Registration via Portfolio Pathway and how the SAS LED surgeons can get involved with this network. Prof Grant McIntyre, Vice-President of RCSEd succinctly summarised a highly successful Conference and thanked everyone involved.
Looking Beyond Birmingham
While delegates undoubtedly left Birmingham with new knowledge, the most important takeaway may have been a renewed sense of possibility.
Whether discussing specialist registration, patient safety improvement, academic development or artificial intelligence, the conference repeatedly demonstrated that SAS and LED clinicians have both the capability and the opportunities to shape the future of healthcare.
The challenge now is to translate the conversations, insights and ideas from Birmingham into meaningful action. We as SASLED can and must get involved!
Because the future of surgery and dentistry will depend not only on recognising the value of SAS and LED clinicians, but on investing in their development, supporting their ambitions and ensuring their voices continue to influence the profession at every level. RCSEd leads the way.
Written by Mr Nishan Fernando (MBChB, MRCS, FHEA, FFSTEd) and Mr Majid Mukadam (MBE FRCS(C-Th), MRCS(Edin), MCh(CVTS), PGCE(UoB)).
