Vietnam Airlines will support the transportation of international experts to Vietnam to attend the first South East Asian Conference of the World Alliance of Airway Management (Photo: FTW).

The conference, expected to draw one thousand global delegates, has been organised and facilitated by the UK charity Facing The World (FTW) in conjunction with hospital anaesthetists from the 108 Central Hospital, Viet Duc Hospital and Hong Ngoc Hospital, and with support from Vietnam Airlines – the national flag carrier.

Bringing international airway experts together, the conference will facilitate links between airway societies, special interest groups, airway fellowship providers, training centres and airway related charities as well as a repository for local, national, and international airway societies, guidelines, statements, airway related education, research projects, research opportunities and grants.

The first day of the conference will be held at Hong Ngoc Hospital and the second, at Viet Duc Hospital, with presentations from international and Vietnamese speakers, discussing airway management-related topics such as the preoperative assessment of a difficult airway, multimodal approaches to manage the difficult airway, airway management of laryngeal tumours, paediatric difficult airways, advanced airway management in critical illness, and airway management in special situations.

FTW CEO Katrin Kandel said by facilitating the first WAAM conference in Vietnam, FTW and its partners expect to create opportunities to share medical knowledge and skills through professional exchange and training programmes around the world.

Katrin Kandel, who is a board advisor to WAAM, said the organisation of the event in Vietnam is the result of Vietnamese doctors visiting experts in the UK under FTW- funded training programmes and seeing the benefits of guidelines for difficult airway management. She added the Vietnamese doctors attended the first two conferences held by WAAM, and building on this, FTW has convinced the organisation to hold the first ever conference outside of western world in conjunction with FTW’s Vietnamese partner hospitals, namely Hong Ngoc, Viet Duc and 108, as well as with the Vietnamese Anaesthetic Society.

Katrin Kandel along with WAAM believes this true collaboration will be the start of many such annual conferences in different regions around the world.

WAAM is a not-for-profit grouping that aims to provide a link between Airway Societies and establish relationships with other organisations concerned with airway management. Previous world meetings of the Alliance have been attended by thousands of healthcare professionals from over 70 countries.

FTW is a UK-registered medical charitable foundation set up in 2002 to treat children from developing countries with craniofacial defects. The foundation started operations in Vietnam in 2007. To date, it has helped provide surgeries for thousands children with craniofacial defects across Vietnam and sent over 200 Vietnamese doctors to world class medical institutions in the UK, Canada, the US and Australia for training. The foundation has also donated 2.4 million pounds (roughly 3 million USD) worth of telemedicine technology and surgical equipment to its partner hospitals in Vietnam.

In the next five years, FTW plans to enable a further 40,000 operations to be performed by its trained Vietnamese doctors. It expects to send at least another 200 Vietnamese doctors abroad for training and continue to donate medical equipment.