Thanks SIVA!

Getting to know the anaesthesia community over the last few years is just one of the privileges we’ve had, as we work towards safer surgery and anaesthesia worldwide.

It’s a wide-ranging, dynamic – and generous! – group.  Actually, it’s really more of a group of groups, each one focused on a particular aspect (research, paediatrics, difficult airways, etc) and ultimately combining to make anaesthesia such a fascinating, complicated and safety-conscious speciality.

One such group is SIVA, the Society for Intravenous Anaesthesia.  As drug availability, technology and technique for delivery anaesthesia improves, SIVA plays a leading role in guiding best practice.

They also don’t need telling twice that anaesthesia without pulse oximetry monitoring is a crisis.

In the spring of 2015, SIVA joined our co-founders the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland (AAGBI) in supporting the Lifeboxes for Rio campaign.

The goal of the campaign is to raise funds for 600 pulse oximeters, to be distributed across operating theatres in need.

We’re enormously grateful to SIVA, whose generous contribution took us 10 oximeters closer to this ambitious target!

Their donation of £1,600 arrived just in time for the first delivery, as we committed 42 oximeters to support trainees and graduates of the Uganda Anaesthesia Fellowship programme.

Uganda was the site of the very first Lifebox oximeter distribution and training programme, producing the first published results that showed how sustainable education and equipment distribution changes lives long-term.

This donation will make sure that monitoring keeps pace with the growing number of operations take place each year – and that together, the anaesthesia community continues to support our colleagues in anaesthesia around the world.

Thank you again – we look forward to sharing our work, and our commitment to safer anaesthesia worldwide with this extraordinary community for years to come!