Speakers
Professor Andy Higgs
Professor Matt Wiles
Stream 2
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.
Matt Wiles completed anaesthetic training in Nottingham in conjunction with a research post as a Clinical Lecturer at the University of Nottingham, before taking a consultant post at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. His clinical commitments primarily involve sessions in critical care and major trauma, with a particular interest in traumatic brain and spinal cord injury. He is Trust Clinical Lead for the Major Trauma service. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Anaesthesia and is an active researcher, regularly publishing in peer-reviewed journals. He has also authored two major anaesthetic textbooks.
Dr Ellard attended The University of Melbourne medical school and completed her Anaesthesia training at Austin Health and Canberra Hospital. She was awarded the Cecil Gray prize for the FANZCA Part 2 Anaesthesia examination in 2009.
She was chief fellow at Toronto General Hospital in 2011 – 2012 and during this time completed fellowships in difficult airway, liver transplantation and cardiac anaesthesia, as well as obtaining accreditation with the National Board of Echocardiography for the advanced peri-operative Trans-oesophageal echocardiography examination.
Dr Ellard’s clinical interests include Cardiac surgery, Liver transplantation and major hepatobiliary surgery. She maintains a strong interest in difficult airway management and has published several book chapters and review articles on airway management topics. She completed a Masters of Clinical Leadership (Hons) in 2019. Dr Ellard is the current president of the Safe Airway Society, the interprofessional airway society for Australia and New Zealand.