Inaugural Lecture with Professor Mike Grocott Event

Mike Grocott is the Professor of Anaesthesia and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Southampton (UoS) and a consultant in Critical Care Medicine at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHS) where he leads the the critical care research area of the UHS-UoS NIHR Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit.

Mike leads the Xtreme-Everest Oxygen Research Consortium and summited Everest in spring 2007 leading the team that successfully measured arterial blood gases close to the summit. He also leads the Fit-4-Surgery Group exploring the relationship between physical fitness, exercise training and outcome following major surgery.

He is Director of the NIAA Health Services Research Centre and chairs the National Emergency Laparotomy Audit. His research interests include human responses to hypoxia, measuring and improving outcome following surgery, acute lung injury, and fluid therapy.

You can watch the footage from this event here.

Synopsis: Critical illness occurs when organ function fails acutely: death is common. Better supportive therapies have improved survival, but specific interventions to treat critical illness have been largely unsuccessful. Drugs that showed promise in bench-top and animal studies have failed in human studies. To overcome this barrier, some critical care researchers now focus their attention on studying humans under conditions that mimic critical illness.

The pathology of critical illness is in general characterised by cellular hypoxia, inflammation and metabolic derangement. Separating signal from noise is challenging in this complex environment. Professor Grocott will talk about exploring variation in two human models that may teach us more about critical illness: healthy humans ascending to altitude and patients undergoing major surgery.