Well done to all Principal Investigators in the Department who have recently been awarded research grants. Here is our monthly round-up of funding successes*. (more…)
Blog posts
Well done to all Principal Investigators in the Department who have recently been awarded research grants. Here is our monthly round-up of funding successes*. (more…)
Professor Alun Davies, Professor of vascular surgery & consultant surgeon, has been elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. The Fellowship brings together experts from across all academic fields to promote research, inspire learning, provide independent policy advice and promote awareness of how the sciences and the arts, humanities and social sciences benefit society. (more…)
Mr Sanjay Purkayastha, Clinical Senior Lecturer in Bariatric Surgery and Consultant Surgeon for the Department, has worked with fashion retailer Burberry to supply St Mary’s Hospital with one tonne of surgical gowns. (more…)
Well done to all Principal Investigators in the Department who have recently been awarded research grants. Here is our monthly round-up of funding successes*.
Imperial offers several platforms and services to help track, curate and promote your research. These services are heavily integrated to the College systems, with the information and data being fed into a number of important platforms that will be fundamental in the Department and Faculty’s 2021 REF submission.
This blog will lay out what is expected of every member of staff that publishes research, how these systems work, where data is pulled to and from and, most importantly, the benefits for you and your future research. (more…)
Congratulations to members of the Department who have recently had their research findings published. Here’s our round-up of recent publication successes (20/01/20-26/02/20).*
Well done to all Principal Investigators in the Department who have recently been awarded research grants. Here is our monthly round-up of funding successes*.
Congratulations to members of the Department who have recently had their research findings published. Here’s our round-up of recent publication successes (19/11/19 -19/01/20).* (more…)
At the end of 2019, Head of Department, Professor George Hanna spoke at the National Women in Surgery Conference 2019 hosted by the UCL Surgical Society. Statistics from the Royal College of Surgeons show that only 12.9% of consultant surgeons are female (as of 2019), which is why events such as this are vital for showing medical students and foundation trainees across the country that surgery is an achievable target for a woman.
Chris Lattimer PhD, vascular surgeon and director of the Josef Pflug Vascular Laboratory, was presented with the v-WIN foundation SING award (Science, Innovation & New Generations) at the International Union of Phlebology in Kracow, Poland.
Congratulations to Layla Bolton Saghdaoui, a research nurse in vascular surgery at Imperial, who has been awarded a place on the NIHR Fellowship Programme. The programme will not only give her the skills she needs to complete a PhD, but will also take her around the world.
Taking maternity leave in an academic institution can often prove to be a bit of a Balancing Act. In our second piece in the series, Jennifer Simeon, who has worked in the Department of Surgery and Cancer as Postgraduate Education Administrator for over 5 years, talks about her experience of taking maternity leave as professional technical operational staff-member (PTO).
Tuesday 11th June saw the second installment of the Healthcare Professional Academic Group (HPAG) lunchtime seminars. 15 members of the group were in attendance for two hugely insightful talks from Professor Alison McGregor and Claire Leon Villapalos.
Alison is a Professor in Musculoskeletal Biodynamics and gave a talk entitled ‘Keeping Amputees on their feet’ highlighting her work with the Centre for Blast Injury Support at Imperial College London. A lot of the work is about understanding the long-term health of amputees and the challenges involved in this including stump health, back pain, ageing, well being, social integration, osteoporosis and employment. All of these being contributing factors involved when developing more advanced prototypes in prosthesis.
In individuals that wear stumps there are never-ending issues with infection and inability to wear them for long periods. As most amputees have no feeling in the limb to which the stump is attached to, they do not feel pain or pressure which overall leads to problems and worsening medical woes. With this fact in mind, the students within the Blast Unit have been working with a team from the Department of engineering on a smart socket prototype which includes sensors that can identify pain and pressure points. This sends signals to a mobile phone which can also give indication for adjustments and fit of the stump.
Olympic Medalist Dave Henson is one of the students involved in this, using his own experience of prosthesis within competitive sport as well as every day life really bridging the gap in sport, engineering and medical research. There is still some work to be done but the future looks bright for amputees.
Claire Leon Villapalos is an Honorary Clinical Research Fellow at Imperial and using her nursing background as a basis for research in safety in a clinical background. Her talk entitled ‘An exploration of the relationships between staff and perceptions of safety in adult intensive care (ICU) and staffing, patient and work environment characteristics’ reflected the research that she did to understand the perception of health and safety within a clinical environment and staff involvement. Most individuals would define safety as checks on surroundings or equipment but within a medical environment, staff safety and how safe they feel under low and high-risk circumstances in a huge every day challenge. In order to assess this, Claire set up a traffic light system in which staff were asked to tick red (least Safe), yellow (safety concerns) or green (mostly safe) during each shift; this was to try to understand the key factors that made staff less safe based on workload intensity, care hours per patient, number of patients in side rooms, level of patients medical needs. By the end of the research, there were a total od 2836 responses giving good gravitas to produce relevant findings. It was shown that staff actually felt safer with more acute patients, but findings show that there are more staff taking care of these patients compared to less acute which poses questions as to whether staffing models are more focused towards sicker patients. Stage two of this research involved a more structured interview process in order to get the views and highlight the good and bad points from all medical staff. Claire is to do further research to involve patients, families and equipment which in turn hopefully will attain further funding to hopefully change the dynamics in a crucial area of clinical work.
Both Alison and Claire got full engagement, and both had an influx of questions and further highlighted the impact of HPAG and the need to really support healthcare professionals who are such a fundamental part of medicine and research.
Next Seminar TBC for the Autumn.
Congratulations to Prof Francesca Cordeiro, who received the prestigious Duke Elder Award from the Royal College of Ophthalmologists at the their 2019 annual congress.
The Department of Surgery and Cancer has received their Athena SWAN Silver award after a long but successful application process. The application involved colleagues from across the Department but central to the success was the efforts of the People and Culture Committee.