Editor’s Welcome

Surgeons’ News recently witnessed a historic gathering of eight RCSEd Presidents, including Professor Sir John Temple, who was President of the College at the launch of the magazine’s first issue in 2002. This gathering represents the longest unbroken period for which previous and current Presidents have met on the occasion of the College AGM. It is also the first occasion when there has been a continuous run of seven past Presidents.

 We were also delighted to see Sarah Healy, Co-Chair of the RCSEd Younger Fellows Network, reading Surgeons’ News in Lapland! We love to see the magazine on tour, so please send your photos to surgeonsnews@rcsed.ac.uk. In this issue, we recognise International Women’s Day. We’ve come a long way since the Edinburgh Seven became the first women matriculated students at
any British University in 1869. We can be proud of our College, which actively encourages leadership for women and has women embedded in every faculty, group, board and committee.

We have five outstanding women on our College Council, including one of our Vice-Presidents. RCSEd awards the prestigious Hunter Doig Medal, named in honour of Alice Headwards Hunter and Caroline Doig, two women with outstanding career potential and ambition. In our feature on pages 14–16, you can learn more about the previous recipients of this award. We hope their humbly told stories of success, achievement and inspiration will challenge perceptions of women in surgery. Anna Paisley, Chair of the College’s Patient Safety Group, takes the opportunity to raise awareness of systemic gender bias in healthcare, and highlights key women’s achievements in patient safety on pages 22–23.

On 5 April, a Women in Surgery exhibition at the Surgeons’ Hall Museums, led by the excellent RCSEd Heritage Team, will open, and includes a specially commissioned painting. You can learn more about the painting, the ideas behind it and a little about the artist Kirstin MacKinnon in our feature on pages 38–41. On pages 30–33, our Heritage Team addresses ‘the problematic paradigm of the firsts’ by sharing the stories of some lesser-known figures whose influence on our surgical practice has been considerable. We couldn’t have a Women in Surgery focus without talking about the elephant in the room!

The past year has seen the publication of several pieces of peer-reviewed research, which suggest women surgeons get better surgical outcomes. But do they really, or are these large-scale, peer-reviewed studies as flawed as some might claim? Katherine Conroy, Arghavan Salles and Alex Ashman delve into the data on pages 6–8. We hope you enjoy the light relief of this issue’s Wellbeing article, in which Yusuf Michla shares his passion for fell walking. And if you haven’t already signed up to attend the Triennial and ICOSET Conference in June, turn to page 24 where you can learn more about this fantastic event. We look forward to seeing you there.