One of the great pleasures of being president of the OAA has been the access it has given me to the huge number of projects and activities in which the OAA is involved. These range from educational meetings, NOAD, the website, working with our own and other Colleges and most importantly furthering the development of our subspecialty both at home and abroad. It will be hard to hand over to Gordon Lyons at our annual general meeting in May! As you are aware our Committee members have various responsibilities. David Levy, for example, has the difficult task of updating and maintaining our website. One of the problems that he is currently trying to resolve is that of seamless access to the full text of IJOA via the members' area.This is proving to be more difficult than anticipated and David is working in close cooperation with Elsevier and our Secretariat to try and resolve the various problems. In the meantime bear with us, seamless access to IJOA will eventually happen. The SHO training document has been under review by both our Training Subcommittee and the Royal College of Anaesthetists. The final version of this document has now been agreed and I am hopeful this document will be available on the website in the near future. Last September Dr Jimmy Gardiner (Dublin) and Dr Mark Scrutton (Bristol) joined a multinational group teaching obstetric anaesthesia in 10 hospitals spread throughout Turkey. The trip had been organised by Dr Medge Owen, under the umbrella of the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology's (SOAP's) International Outreach Group. The trip attracted much media attention within Turkey and culminated in a live television presentation of a caesarean section being performed under regional anaesthesia. Dr Owen is planning a similar trip to Croatia in September 2005 and is looking for a recruit from the OAA.The OAA always aims to support teaching and training both at home and abroad, so if you are a willing teacher or know of teaching programmes abroad that might benefit from our help, please contact myself or the Hon Secretary. What of the future? We are all looking forward to the superb programme planned for this year's annual meeting at the Barbican in London on May 12-13. Dr Liz McGrady has already secured some very exciting speakers for the 2006 annual meeting in Glasgow. Meanwhile our US colleagues in SOAP have suggested a combined SOAP/OAA meeting to be held in Dublin on August 10-12, 2006. The financial and other implications of this meeting are currently under consideration, and if these prove to be viable, this meeting will find its way on to our meetings' calendar.
