Speakers
Professor Andy Higgs
Professor Matt Wiles
Dr Louise Ellard
Dr Imran Ahmad
Hall 5
Airway management in critical care extends far beyond simply placing a tracheal tube. In this collaborative session with the Difficult Airway Society (DAS), experts will explore three challenging areas frequently encountered in intensive care: i) airway management in patients with suspected or confirmed cervical spine injury, ii) the practical application of extubation guidelines, and iii) the updated guidelines for unanticipated difficult tracheal intubation in adults. Combining the latest evidence with practical advice from the frontline, this session will equip delegates with the knowledge and confidence to manage complex airway scenarios when the stakes are highest.
Chairs: Andy Higgs and Linda Jayne Mottram
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.
I am a Consultant at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, where I am the Deputy Clinical Director of Theatres, Anaesthesia and Perioperative medicine. I have a specialist interest in difficult airway management and I am the clinical lead for airway management at the Trust and the education lead for the Guy’s advanced airway fellowship for over 10 years, having trained over 50 airway fellows to date.
I am the immediate past President of the Difficult Airway Society (DAS) UK, having been the Honorary Secretary and I have been a DAS committee member for over 14 years. I am also an Honorary Clinical Lecturer at King’s College, London and have been awarded the Difficult Airway Society Professorship of Anaesthesia and Airway Management in November 2025.
I have over 5000 citations, an H-index of 27 and over 100 peer reviewed publications which include four DAS guidelines (2015 & 2025 intubation guidelines, 2018 ATI guidelines and 2020 post thyroidectomy haematoma guidelines). The 2015 DAS Guidelines paper was awarded the top cited airway paper ever by the BJA in its 100 year history. I have also been awarded ‘Anaesthesia Journal paper of the year 2020’ for the IntubateCOVID study and 2nd ranked paper in 2022 for the AEROCOMP study and many commendations for top downloaded and cited papers of the year awards.
I have contributed to numerous airway management books, including Hagberg & Benumhof’s Airway Management book, Core Topics in Airway management and Virtual Endoscopy and 3D reconstructions in the airways.
I chaired the DAS commissioned 2025 intubation guidelines group, which were launched at WAMM 3 in Florence and published in November 2025 in the BJA. In the first 4 months after launch the paper has been downloaded over almost 200,000 times by a global audience. I am also a co-author of the recently published pre-hospital airway management guidelines and the obesity airway management guidelines.
L-J is a Consultant in Intensive Care Medicine and Anaesthesia at the Royal Victoria Hospital, where she has worked for the past 13 years—long enough to acquire strong opinions on coffee and an enduring personal relationship with weekends on call.
An Honours graduate of the Queen's University of Belfast, she completed her postgraduate training in Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine within the Northern Ireland Deanery. She is an examiner for the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine and serves as Thoracic Anaesthesia Lead for Belfast Health and Social Care Trust.
Her professional interests include airway management, medical education, and conducting efficient ward rounds. She subscribes to the theory that the length of a ward round is inversely proportional to the number of decisions made, and is ideally completed before the coffee gets cold.
Outside the intensive care unit, L-J has been married to Dave for just over 20 years. She is the exasperated mother of four children, all of whom provide regular opportunities to refine her skills in diplomacy, negotiation, and functioning on remarkably little sleep.