Legal & Ethical - Adverse Outcomes - Case Review on the ICU

Chris Danbury

Consultant Intensive Care Physician , University Hospital, Southampton

Chris has over 30 years’ experience as a doctor, training initially in general internal medicine, microbiology/virology and anaesthesia before switching to intensive care medicine. In 2002, he was appointed as consultant intensive physician at the Royal Berkshire Hospital. He moved to University Hospital Southampton in December 2020; his practice is in General and Neuro Intensive Care Medicine.

He holds academic roles at the University of Southampton, Kings College London and the University of Reading. His research interests are in complex decision-making related to serious medical treatment, and he has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine for exceptional services to the science and practice of Forensic and Legal Medicine.

Chris has been Honorary Secretary of the Intensive Care Society, founded and Chaired the Legal and Ethical Policy Unit of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine and been a member of national guideline development groups in a number of key areas, including Prolonged Disorders of Consciousness.

Thearina de Beer

Consultant Intensivist and Anaesthesia, UK

Dr Thearina de Beer MBChB FRCA DICM FFICM LLM (Health Law) RCPathME , is a Consultant in Anaesthetics and ICM including Neuro-ICM at Nottingham University Hospitals. Thearina is currently Divisional Director for the Clinical Support Division. She is a Medical Examiner at NUH and is deputy lead ME for NUH. She is on the ICS – Legal and Ethical Advisory Group. Her special interests are delirium and the impact on long stay patients, legal and ethical issues around critical and neuro-critical care.

Helena Durham

Helena Durham is a lay member of the Ethics of Clinical Practice Committee at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and a patient/carer representative on the Trust's Mortality and End of Life Care Group. 

Dan Harvey

Professor of Intensive Care Medicine , UK

Dr Dan Harvey is a Consultant in Intensive Care Medicine at Nottingham University Hospitals, Hon. Professor at the University of Nottingham, and a member of the UK Intensive Care Society Legal & Ethical Advisory Group. Dan has an active research interest as National Lead for Innovation & Research in Organ Donation for NHS Blood and Transplant, and joint Chief Investigator for the SIGNET study, the world's largest interventional study in organ donation.

Jenny Kitzinger

Co-Director, Coma and Disorders of Consciousness Research Centre, UK

Professor Jenny KItzinger is co-director of the Coma and Disorders of Consciousness Research Centre at Cardiff University (cdoc.org.uk) - a multi-disciplinary group of researchers exploring the ethical, legal and social dimensions of vegetative and minimally conscious states. She is co-author of multiple papers about the decision-making process around life-sustaining treatment and particularly the place of a person’s own values in ‘best interests’. This work has informed online training for healthcare professionals (cdoctraining.org.uk) and a website resource for patients’ families (healthtalk.org) which has been used by over 50,000 people and won a BMA award for its information on ethical issues.  

: @JennyKitzinger

Nina Lewis

Dr Nina Lewis is a consultant physician and honorary assistant professor of gastroenterology at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. 

At East Midlands’ largest specialist oncology unit, she is the lead gastroenterologist responsible for providing expert opinion on the assessment and management of cancer treatment complications on the gut. Dr Lewis also provides supra-specialist assessment and care of gut complications following bone marrow transplant treatments for haematological cancers. 

As an expert in diagnosing cancer, Dr Lewis introduced to Nottinghamshire the suspected cancer of unknown primary clinical pathway to help achieve an earlier diagnosis of cancer regardless of a person’s mode of presentation.

Following formal training in her lectureship, she has a busy IBD clinical practice which supports national observational genotype studies.

Dr Lewis is an experienced medical examiner and has undertaken independent scrutiny on over 3000 deaths for the Nottingham Medical Examiner Service.  

Rob Tobin

Partner at Kennedys Law,

Rob leads Kennedys’ healthcare team in Cambridge. He advises NHS Trusts on healthcare law, medical negligence litigation, end of life decisions, judicial reviews, consent and capacity to treatment, inquests and mental health and capacity law. Working with NHS Resolution he manages a team of lawyers working on clinical negligence claims of the utmost severity, including cerebral palsy, neurological injuries, neonatal deaths and psychiatric injuries. He has a specialist practice in medical treatment cases involving declarations to treat and withdrawal of treatment and lectures on these topics. He is legal advisor to the Intensive Care Society’s LEAG and to Thrive LDN, a mental health taskforce.  He sits on the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust clinical ethics advisory group. During the pandemic, Rob actively advised the ICS and the National Executive Critical Care Committee. Rob’s recent high profile cases include: AH v Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (2021) – obtaining a declaration to withdraw ventilation from a 56 year old, described as “the most complex COVID patient in the world” and Tafida Raqeeb v Barts Health NHS Trust and others (2019) – complex Judicial Review and treatment case concerning withdrawal of life sustaining treatment for 5 year old Muslim child.