Professor Andy Higgs

Andy Higgs is a Consultant in Anaesthesia & Intensive Care Medicine in Warrington Hospitals, Cheshire, having trained in Liverpool, North West England and Melbourne, Australia. He has a long-standing interest in airway management, especially extubation and in the ICU. Andy was Clinical Director of ICU between 2005 and 2007 and joint Clinical Lead Anaesthesia/ICU from 2007 to 2011. He is a faculty member and contributor to the Aintree Difficult Airway Management course. He co-authored the Difficult Airway Society Extubation Guidelines (2012) and chairs the joint Royal College of Anaesthetists/Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine/DAS group, aiming to produce a guideline for Airway Management in the Critically Ill.

Professor Sarah Wallace OBE

Consultant Speech and Language Therapist in Critical Care

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.