March 2022 : Anaesthesia, Pain and Critical Care group win ‘Best Paper of the Year’ award

Bristol's Anaesthesia, Pain and Critical Care (APCC) group has been awarded the Journal of Anaesthesia and Association of Anaesthetists' "John Smith Airway Best Paper 2022" award for a study funded by the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute. The study found that anaesthetic procedures have a much lower risk of aerosol generation than previously thought, helping to speed up surgical procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read about the APCC group’s study on our news pages.

September 2021 : Congratulations to Dr Ronelle Mouton (joint lead) and colleagues who have secured support for the CAMELOT study  (Continuous rectus sheath Analgesia in eMErgency LaparOTomy). This is a NIHR HTA funded (£1.6m) study that will recruit 750 patients in a multi-centre, randomised sham-controlled trial of rectus sheath catheter-delivered local anaesthetic infusion compared with usual care in patients undergoing emergency bowel surgery.

September 2021 : Another seed for a project planted by Dr Aravind Ramesh and Dr Matt Thomas to study the respiratory microbiome in ventilated patients (with or without COVID-19) on ICU supported by the Southmead Hospital Charity.

August 2021 : More good news for Dr Amber Young who is a co-applicant on a NIHR funded extension to the CONSORT study to look at studies using a surrogate measure as a primary outcome.

August 2021 : Our academic training pipeline remains vibrant and we have just heard that we have two more NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow posts to be appointed in Anaesthesia / Critical Care over the next two years.  Adverts for the first one to be posted soon.

July 2021: Prof Tony Pickering, Dr Jim Dunham and colleagues at the University of Bristol look forward to contributing to the UKRI/Versus Arthritis Advanced Pain Discovery Platform as part of the Psychosocial consortium.  This is a collaboration across 7 UK Universities and led from the University of Bath who have been awarded £3.8m to produce a step change in the conduct of pain research in the UK.

June 2021 : Congratulations to Professor Tim Cook OBE on his recent recognition in the Queen’s honours list for his bottom-up research contributions to anaesthetic practice, quality and safety.  This has spanned many years, but his work has been particularly prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic where he has helped to raise awareness of the risks, need for mitigations and the consequences for the NHS.