Abstract
For the first time in the history of the prize, the Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Jeanette Thirlwell Best Paper Award for 2020 has joint winners. It has been awarded to Drs Kasia Kulinski and Natalie Smith of the Departments of Anaesthesia, Prince of Wales and Wollongong Hospitals, NSW, for their paper entitled ‘Surgical prehabilitation using mobile health coaching in patients with obesity: a pilot study’,1 and also to Dr Yasmin Endlich and colleagues from the Department of Anaesthesia, Royal Adelaide Hospital, Women’s and Children’s Hospital, South Australia, for their paper ‘Difficult and failed intubation in the first 4000 incidents reported on webAIRS’.2
The 2020 Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Junior Investigator Award has been awarded to Dr Jessica Lim of the Department of Anaesthesia, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, for ‘Neuroimmune mechanisms of pain: basic science and potential therapeutic modulators’.3
Readers are reminded that the origin, history and judging of both of these awards have been discussed in detail for those who might be interested.4
In addition, and for the third year running, both the Journal and the Society are extremely proud to congratulate the authors of one of the papers published this time in the 2020 Anaesthesia and Intensive Care History Supplement. Dr Adam Levin’s paper,5 cowritten with our regular Cover Note contributors Christine Ball and Peter Featherstone, entitled ‘From cholera to COVID-19: how pandemics have shaped the development of anaesthesia and intensive care medicine’, has been awarded the 2020 David Zuck Memorial Prize of the History of Anaesthesia Society (UK) for the year’s best journal article on the history of anaesthesia.6
And finally, the History of Anaesthesia Library, Museum and Archives (HALMA) Committee of the Australian Society of Anaesthetists takes great pleasure in announcing that Levin et al.5 are also the 2021 winners of its Biennial History Award. This award is for the best paper on the history of anaesthesia and related disciplines judged from those published in either the Anaesthesia & Intensive Care Journal or its History Supplement in the previous two years (2019–20). The Committee would like to heartily congratulate the winning authors for both their research and narrative and would like to recommend their article as a comprehensive ‘must-read’, particularly in view of the current world predicament.
On behalf of all the Editors, the Editorial Board and the Australian Society of Anaesthetists, congratulations to all our Journal award winners for papers published in 2020.