Inside Intensive Care: Insight into AHP Advanced/Consultant Practice

Ella Terblanche

Critical Care Dietitian and PhD Research Student, Health Sciences University

Ella is a critical care dietitian, researcher, and strategic workforce leader with extensive clinical, academic, and national leadership experience across the NHS. She was honoured with an MBE in 2021 for services to critical care dietetics, recognising her sustained contribution to advancing practice, leadership, and professional standards.

She was the professional lead for dietetics for NHS Elect/ ICS AHP Critical Care Capability Framework and most recently is a project lead for the British Dietetic Association’s workforce programme. She is pursuing a PhD focused on improving nutritional recovery after critical illness, has contributed to multiple national publications, and has served as an investigator on NIHR multicentre portfolio studies.

Zoe Van Willigen

Critical Care Physiotherapist, University Hospital Southampton Foundation Trust

Zoe van Willigen is a Critical Care Physiotherapist with over 20 years’ experience in the speciality. She has led the Early Mobilisation Project on intensive care (ICU) in Southampton since 2012, which is estimated to have saved her NHS trust over £2.5million. Zoe has conducted and published research into the family and patient experience of rehabilitation on ICU, leading to a number of pilot projects to address the provision of services throughout the ICU recovery pathway. Zoe is chair of the Thames Valley and Wessex Critical Care Network’s rehabilitation group and is also employed by the ICUsteps charity as a rehabilitation consultant to lead ICUsteps Active national online rehabilitation classes for former ICU patients. Zoe holds one of only 10 physiotherapy professional advisory group seats for the Intensive Care Society and was also on the specialist advisory group for the recent NCEPOD trial into rehabilitation after critical illness.

Professor Sarah Wallace OBE

Consultant Speech and Language Therapist in Critical Care, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust

Sarah Wallace OBE FRCSLT is a Consultant Speech and Language Therapist (SLT) at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester and honorary senior lecturer at the University of Manchester. She specialises in Critical Care and has over 30 years of clinical experience as an SLT. After training in Manchester, Sarah has worked in hospitals and Non-Government Organisations in the UK, Singapore, Grenada (WI) and Cambodia. Whilst working clinically in cardiothoracic, ECMO and general critical care in Manchester, she also teaches and conducts research internationally, focussing on laryngeal injury, dysphagia and communication issues post intubation and tracheostomy. She has over 60 publications, several top cited articles winning awards from the BMJ and the ICS. She holds expert advisor roles with the Intensive Care Society (ICS), the National Tracheostomy Safety Project and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) and has contributed to many policies, guidelines and initiatives including GPICS, FEES, NCEPOD and the ICS National Rehabilitation Collaborative. Sarah is also an Associate Editor for JICS. She has pioneered new treatments for laryngeal recovery in ICU, setting up the first FEES service in Asia and the UK and supports SLT service development in the UK, Sweden and Chile.