Palliative & End of Life Care on the ICU

Omer Aziz

Paediatric Intensive Care Consultant, Paediatric Clinical Lead for Organ Donation, Co-Chair of Paediatric Death Review and Lead for the MAPLE (Multi-disciplinary Approach to Paediatric End of Life Education) Project.

Rob Chambers

UK

Consultant Intensive Care Medicine and Anaesthesia

Rob has been a full time Consultant at Southampton for 10 years and for the last 9 of those has developed an interest in palliative care on the ICU. This includes dedicated time working alongside the hospital palliative care team, helping reduce the burden of critical illness on patients, families and ICU staff.

Carol Davis

Carol was appointed Senior Lecturer in Palliative Medicine at The Royal Marsden Hospital in 1992 and was lured away a few years later to start up a Hospital Palliative Care Team at Southampton General Hospital.

She has worked there ever since. Carol is a strong advocate of proactive palliative care- running palliative care alongside more disease-based interventions – and of normalising palliative and end of life care as part of essential care in all care settings. Passionate about the need for a truly personalised approach to health care, she aims to take and create opportunities every day to showcase that and teach others how to ‘seek out the person hiding behind the ill patient.’

Over a decade ago she catalysed a local quality improvement project, ‘Palliative Critical Care’, aimed at better integrating palliative care and intensive care by adopting a broader, more structured and more proactive approach. Palliative Critical Care is now a well established part of intensive care in Southampton.

Kathryn Mannix

UK

Kathryn was a consultant in palliative medicine in the north of England for 20 years, working in hospices, patients’ own homes and a large teaching hospital. Her hospital role included working alongside colleagues in the medical and surgical specialties, the Emergency Department and ICU, and co-working palliative care with colleagues specialising in the management of long-term conditions. She took early retirement in 2016 to work for better public understanding of dying; this has included radio work, newspaper articles and a book With the End in Mind that, somewhat expectedly, became an international Best Seller, was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize and was The Times ‘Thought’ Book of the Year. Her second book, Listen, about tender communication, was published in September 2021.

She believes that by naming death, describing the process, and helping people to know what to expect, clinicians can have honest, frank and helpful conversations with patients and families that promote better planning of end of life care and reduce unnecessary and unhelpful medical complications of dying.

Melinda Presland

Melinda qualified from the University of Bradford in 2005, and has worked in many sectors of pharmacy including community, mental health and the prison service. Melinda started her specialist palliative care career in 2009 in a Macmillan palliative care team, focused on providing pharmaceutical support to patients in the primary care setting. Melinda moved to her Consultant Pharmacist post in Oxford in 2019 where she continues to work. Melinda has worked as Senior Clinical Lead in palliative care for NHSE/I, and is chair person of the Association of Supportive and Palliative Care Pharmacy (ASPCP).

Melinda is a qualified non-medical prescriber, and has a Post Graduate Certificate in Clinical Education, which supports her in her passion for planning and delivery of education, both to pharmacists and other health care professionals.

Radha Sundaram

Dr Radha Sundaram MBBS MRCP FRCA DICM FFICM  is a Consultant in Intensive Care and Anaesthetics at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley . Having qualified in India, she did her postgraduate medical, anaesthetic and intensive care training in Liverpool, Oxford and Glasgow. She has been the Regional Advisor for training in ICM in Scotland and is currently the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Lead  for the University of Glasgow medical school.She is a Clinical Lead for Organ Donation in Scotland to promote awareness amongst BME communities.  Over the last ten years , she has worked with NHSBT , Scottish Government and Kidney Research UK to improve education and awareness around organ donation in the multi ethnic communitiesin Scotland. She organised the first Faith and Organ Donation seminar in Scotland in June 2015 , a platform to encourage convesations between faith and community leaders and healthcare professionals. She has also established a diverse medical student volunteer network to help disseminate vital information and dispel myths amongst our communities.The recent change in legislation in Scotland to opt out has encouraged conversations not just with communities but with politicians from ethnic backgrounds as well. She has recently collaborated with a working group in India to develop India s first guidelines on donation after circulatory death. She is currently working with various groups to improve death literacy and normalise the inclusion of  organ donation into routine end of life conversations.Her interests include End of Life care, Renal Replacement Therapy and Organ Donation. 
 

Zoe Van Willigen

Critical Care Physiotherapist

Zoe van Willigen is a Critical Care Physiotherapist with almost twenty 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 has also recently been employed by ICUSteps to lead 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 is also on the specialist advisory group for the current NCEPOD trial into rehabilitation after critical illness.

Tamara Vega

Tamara was an Emergency Dept nurse for 20 years before moving to being a Specialist Nurse Organ Donation (SNOD) in 2019, which combined her passion for providing End of Life care and organ donation. She has been a Lead Nurse in Organ Donation since November 2021.