The film Titanic was released in 1977. It won eleven academy awards including best picture and best director and went on to gross $2.195 billion globally.

As we all know; the film told the story of the maiden voyage and tragic sinking of the Titanic as seen through the eyes of two lovers played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio. The theme song “My Heart Will Go On” was Celine Dion’s biggest hit selling more than fifteen million copies worldwide and topping the charts in many countries.

In March 1909, work began on the Titanic in the massive Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, and took two years. On 31st  May 1911, Titanic’s immense hull made its way down the slipway and into the river Lagan in Belfast. The hull was immediately towed to a mammoth fitting-out dock where thousands of workers would spend most of the next year building the ship’s decks, constructing her lavish interiors, and installing the twenty-nine giant boilers that would power her two main steam engines. Titanic was described as unsinkable. She featured a double bottom and fifteen watertight bulkhead compartments equipped with electric watertight doors that could be operated individually or simultaneously by a switch on the bridge.

Titanic departed for its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, on April 10th , 1912. After stops in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown (now known as Cobh), Ireland, the ship set sail for New York with 2,240 passengers and crew. On April 14th, at about 11:30 p.m., a lookout saw an iceberg dead ahead. The engines were quickly reversed, and the ship was turned sharply and instead of making direct impact, Titanic seemed to graze along the side of the iceberg. The iceberg had a jagged underwater spur, which slashed a 300-foot gash in the hull below the ship’s waterline.

Titanic stubbornly stayed afloat for close to three hours. Nearly perpendicular and with many of her lights still aglow, finally sank beneath the ocean’s surface at about 2:20 a.m. on April 15th, 1912.

Titanic sailed with 2,223 passengers on board. The sinking took the lives of 1,347 men and only 103 women. Most of the crew also died during the sinking of the Titanic. There were 899 crew members, and 685 of them died during the tragedy.

The wreck of Titanic was discovered in 1985. The ship was split in two and is gradually disintegrating at a depth of 12,415 feet (2,069.2 fathoms: 3,784 m). Belfast continued its relationship with the Titanic by opening the world’s largest Titanic visitor experience in 2012.

And so, it was to Belfast in September 2022 that the UK Association of Anaesthetists came to hold their annual congress and celebrate ninety years of the association.

Even here there was a link to the Titanic. One of the keynote speakers Great Uncle was the assistant surgeon on the Titanic.

Forty-two companies exhibited at this year’s annual congress and Innovgas was there. We had a simple but professional booth with exhibition panels promoting our products, lots of samples and sales literature. I attended and was supported by colleagues Marie and Karen from our Irish distributor Brennan&Co.

The 3-day meeting was attended by seven hundred delegates which included around one hundred international delegates. We had an excellent booth position next to the association meeting zone and a coffee station.

Seventy-four customers visited the booth. They all were extremely interested in all our products, and I had high quality discussions with every customer. Sixty-three were from the UK and Ireland, four from Canada, two from Australia, two from New Zealand, two from Singapore and one from Jamaica. 133 EyePro, 30 NoPress and one hundred BiteMe were given to customers as samples. The small number of NoPress was simply down to size. All customers were happy to be contacted after the meeting to discuss our products further.

The response to our products was again incredibly positive and most customers took away samples to try on patients. Specific feedback was:

EyePro

• Customers who used the single tabbed competitor consistently remarked that it constantly falls off because it does not conform very well to the eye. Demonstrating EyePro clearly showed that we are far superior in conforming to the eye and remaining on the eye. Those who used tape were more willing to acknowledge that it is not a clean product, and they should do better.

NoPress

• Customers seemed more willing to admit that blunt trauma does happen to patients. This has not been my experience at previous meetings. They spoke generally that this could happen when the head was draped, and it was usually an elbow or a hand. Three procedures were mentioned several times where NoPress should be used routinely. These were thyroid operations, shoulder arthroscopy in the beach chair position and robotic surgery.

BiteMe

• Again, customers were more willing to admit that they need to do more to protect teeth and that gauze was inadequate and a time-consuming activity. They saw BiteMe as an excellent product to do that. For the first time a customer told me that one patient had bitten through an LMA, and it had blocked the airway causing the patient to choke.

  This happened when he was training, and he was more cautious now using lots of gauze which he felt was still inadequate. He took samples to try and should be a convert. A number of customers commented that Intraoperative neurophysiologic monitoring was becoming more common and therefore biting and saw BiteMe as a product they should be using.

In summary, this was a particularly good meeting to be at.

Conversations with customers provided great opportunities to sell all of our products effectively to a large number of customers. Attending congresses like this allows us to get our strong message to large numbers of customers.

Author: Niall Shannon, European Business Manager, Innovgas

This article is based on research and opinion available in the public domain.

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