AnaesthesiaVault

10/09/2026

She wanted to run up onto the stage with me.

Three and a half years old, in a full Elsa dress, entirely certain that this was her moment too. She was not wrong.

I graduated from UCT yesterday. Catherine was in the crowd with our seven-week-old, our eldest beside her in blue tulle. Crossing that stage and seeing that face looking back at me is the part I will remember, not the certificate.

This is not my degree. It is ours.
Catherine carried these years. The calls, the exams, the nights I was not home. She did it through a stretch I could not have got through alone, and came out of it stronger and happier than before. Every hour I spent studying was an hour she covered.

Thank you to my family, and to the colleagues and consultants who taught me along the way. Registrar training is a team sport. I had the best team.

25/08/2026

A member emailed me a few weeks ago describing his commute.

Download the note as a PDF. Open a separate AI tool. Create a notebook for the topic. Add the PDF as a source. Generate an audio overview. Then drive to work and listen to it.

He did this per topic. Manually. Because there was no other way to use forty minutes of driving for revision.

That workflow is now one tap.

Every note in AnaesthesiaVault now has a podcast version — two hosts working through the material, chapters mapped to the note's own sections, and a full transcript. Episodes download for offline listening, keep playing as you move between notes, and run on the lock screen while you drive. 500+ recordings are live, narrated for anaesthetic vocabulary rather than around it.

The narration is generated. The content is not — every note is written and verified before any of this happens, and the written note stays the authoritative version.

Three weeks from that email to every note having one. That is the actual point: tell me what you need.

23/08/2026

Discharge prescribing

The operation went well. The discharge script gets written in ninety seconds by whoever is nearest the computer, and it is the only part of the anaesthetic the patient takes home.

That is where quantities drift, courses run long, and someone escalates a dose past a cap they did not know existed.

The discharge prescribing reference is built on what is actually registered here, with the schedule on every entry, adult and paediatric.

Open one and you get the usual dose, the maximum in twenty-four hours, and separately the maximum where a risk factor caps it. Mandatory warnings rather than every adverse effect ever reported. Course length by indication. Then a worked example prescription, quantity included, ready to copy.

Start free: https://anaesthesiavault.com/

21/08/2026

Flashcards

Spaced repetition works. Building the deck is what stops people.

Most of us start one, get three weeks in, and abandon it somewhere around the second week of nights.

There are nearly seven thousand cards already written from the vault's own notes. You do not make them. You choose what you see.

Build a session: pick a domain, narrow to a subdomain or a single topic, choose cards that are due, cards that are new, or a mix. Cap the new ones so the queue cannot run away from you. Save it as a preset and it is one click next time.

Every card opens the note it came from.

The deck is already built. Just study.

Start free: https://anaesthesiavault.com/

20/08/2026

Nobody teaches you billing.

You finish your Final, you walk into private practice, and the first thing waiting for you is not a difficult airway. It is a claim, a code, and a medical aid with opinions about both. Going out on your own is intimidating enough without that sitting on top of it.

I have been using Paydoc in my own practice. Onboarding took an afternoon, the MX Node app is simple to use, and knowing the billing side is handled has taken a real weight off.

They have now sponsored full AnaesthesiaVault access for 51 registrars sitting the FCA Final in 2027, across six training centres, at no cost to any of them.

That is a company backing the people who will one day be its customers, before they are its customers.

Looking forward to what comes next.

19/08/2026

Porphyria

Acute porphyria arrives as an emergency laparotomy in someone with abdominal pain and hyponatraemia. Rare enough that you have not looked it up recently. Dangerous enough that you cannot guess.

And the reference you find at two in the morning usually gives you two categories: safe, or not.

The porphyria guide opens with the emergency management — stop the precipitants, treat pain and nausea with porphyria-safe agents, glucose while you wait for haem arginate, correct the sodium slowly — and a direct line to the UCT Porphyria Service.

Underneath, every drug you might give, searchable by name, class or group, in five categories rather than two. Safe, probably safe, caution, avoid, and no data.

Where the evidence does not exist, it says so.

Start free: https://anaesthesiavault.com/

17/08/2026

Paper cases

The viva is not a written paper read aloud. It is a conversation, and it moves.

You can know acromegaly cold and still lose the mark when the examiner mentions, on the morning of surgery, that the patient has hoarseness and tight breathing lying flat.

More than seventy paper cases, written the way they are actually asked. Read mode to work through with the model answers open. Practice mode when you want to be tested — every question in order with the score saved, or one question on its own.

The stem gives you what the examiner gives you. History, examination, investigations, then the curve-ball.

Answer out loud, reveal, mark yourself. Every attempt is kept.

Practise the exam, not the textbook.

Start free: https://anaesthesiavault.com/

17/08/2026

Full reference vault

A reference you cannot navigate is a textbook with extra steps.

Most of us end up with three: one that is authoritative and unusable, one that is quick and unsourced, and a folder of PDFs nobody has opened since the exam.

The vault is organised the way the specialty is. Nine domains, each broken into subdomains, each holding its topics. Filter to what you have not started, what is in progress, what you have bookmarked.

Inside a note: contents, related notes, search within the note, collapsible sections, your own notes kept alongside the text, and the flashcards built from that topic.

And every figure carries its reference on the line, not in a bibliography at the end. If a reference cannot be verified, it is removed.

Read fast. Verify when it matters.

Start free: https://anaesthesiavault.com/

12/08/2026

Coagulation

A patient on the morning list is anticoagulated, and the question is not whether you can do a spinal. It is when.

Timing is where people get caught. The interval before the block is not the interval before the catheter comes out, and neither is the interval before you restart. Renal function moves all three.

The coagulation guide separates them. Search the drug by name, brand, class or abbreviation. Prophylactic and treatment dosing are held apart, because they are not the same answer.

Stop before block. Catheter removal. Restart after a single shot. Restart after removal. First postoperative dose. Plus renal and hepatic considerations, and the bleeding-risk modifiers that shift things further.

Every entry carries its guideline and its references.

Start free: https://anaesthesiavault.com/

07/08/2026

Question bank

Written papers are not marked on what you knew. They are marked on what you wrote, against a schedule you never see.

So practising without the schedule teaches you very little.

The question bank is built the other way round. Short answers, data interpretation and clinical cases, each carrying the marking points the examiner is working from. Separate banks for the Final, the Diploma and Part One.

Answer it properly, on paper, timed if you want the pressure. Then reveal the model answer and mark yourself point by point. Where a question asks for five from a list, it caps at five, exactly as the real schedule does.

Anything you missed opens straight into the reasoning behind it.

Mark yourself the way the examiner will.

Start free: https://anaesthesiavault.com/

350+ interlinked evidence-based notes, question banks, AI tools, and clinical guides. Covering FRCA, EDAIC, FANZCA, FCA. Start free.