Core curriculum topics in orthopaedics – a BIOS initiative

Maneesh Bhatia and Bijayendra Singh

The British Indian Orthopaedic Society (BIOS) is a specialist society affiliated to the British Orthopaedic Association (BOA).

BIOS caters to the broad specialty of trauma and orthopaedics and its main role is to provide educational support to orthopaedic surgeons of Indian origin. Whilst BIOS celebrates its Indian connection, it is also equally proud to be a body of British surgeons who happen to be of Indian origin.

BIOS organises various meetings (including its annual meeting in July), courses and social events besides acting as a forum for informal discussion among its members on issues of mutual interest. BIOS also plays a key role in liaising between the Indian Orthopaedic Association and the British Orthopaedic Association. BIOS organises an Indian Summer scientific session at BOA’s annual congress in collaboration with the Indian Orthopaedic Association, besides its own specialty session which is usually well attended and has always received excellent feedback.

BIOS also organises a range of travelling fellowships to support professional development of surgeons. It has a wellestablished senior and junior travelling fellowship programme, where surgeons from India visit the UK on short term fellowships and gain experience from interacting with their UK counterparts. BIOS also facilitates a reciprocal travelling fellowship programme where British surgeons are sponsored for their visit to India. This gives an opportunity for UK surgeons to experience a large volume of diverse pathologies seen in India.

The COVID-19 lockdown necessitated a new approach to deliver BIOS’s aim of providing educational support to aspiring and established orthopaedic surgeons. For medical students, a range of webinars covering basic orthopaedics topics were run over a period of three months. These very well attended sessions are now available on BIOS’s YouTube channel archives.

Our postgraduate training programme was severely affected during COVID-19. In order to continue providing educational support to our trainees, BIOS launched a webinar series on ‘Core Curriculum Topics in Orthopaedics’ in 2020. This webinar series covers each subspecialty of orthopaedics, with the intention of covering the full curriculum over a threeyear period. Sessions are presented live on the second Sunday of each month at 11am with each session covering three topics of a sub-specialty. There is an opportunity for listeners to interact with and discuss their queries with the expert panel. These sessions are then available on the BIOS YouTube channel for subsequent viewing.

These sessions have been very popular and have received excellent feedback. The second series of these lectures has started this year. Based on the feedback received last year the time for discussion has now been increased giving the trainees plenty of opportunity to interact with the trainers.

This educational content is available at: www.youtube.com/c/BritishIndianOrthopaedic SocietyBIOS/videos or using the QR code.