Real World Anaesthesia Course (RWAC)

The Real World Anaesthesia Course (RWAC) was first developed by Australian anaesthetists Haydn Perndt and George Merridew in the late 1990’s. RWAC was originally run in Tasmania and then expanded to include Darwin in 2004. It now alternates between a small number of Hospitals including Royal Darwin, Christchurch, the Gold Coast (inaugural course in 2025) and the Northern Hospital (from 2026) – and is delivered as a week long, dynamic, interactive, and small intensive. The ASA has had a long association supporting the administration and running of the course.  

RWAC is designed to assist anaesthetists from Australia and New Zealand who have interests in working overseas in resource poor and challenging clinical environments. The course was originally named RSDCDCA –“Remote Situation, Difficult Circumstances, Developing Country Anaesthesia” Course – which aptly describes the work environments discussed at length during the course week.  

RWAC is unique in that it involves a clinical component – whereby small groups of participants are involved in the induction of patients using Drawover anaesthesia equipment – under the supervision of course instructors and the home hospital anaesthesia teams. Drawover anaesthesia equipment is simple, robust and inexpensive compared to modern plenum anaesthesia delivery systems and is commonly used by large International NGOs eg International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF).  

The course numbers are deliberately small to allow a high instructor to participant ratio and maximise the opportunity for interactive and small group discussions of key topics – including the psychology of adaptation, trip preparation, use of ketamine and halothane, and low resource challenges with paediatric and obstetric anaesthesia.