CPOC Director

I am delighted to have been appointed as the inaugural director for the Centre for Perioperative Care. Working currently as the medical director for Sherwood Forest Hospitals Trust, I combine a significant leadership/managerial role with undertaking clinical duties as a consultant in anaesthesia and adult critical care for half of my time.

My journey

My leadership journey began when I became an anaesthetic College tutor, and then the East Midlands regional advisor, a role that I held for eight years before being appointed as head of service and lead clinician following a merger between two Nottingham NHS trusts. During my time as head of service, clinical director, and subsequently divisional director, I have delivered a number of high-value capital and service change/quality improvement projects, which included the innovative vanguard radiology technology consortium – EMRAD – recently adopted as an artificial intelligence testbed.

Opportunities of CPOC

CPOC represents a unique opportunity to promote, advance and develop perioperative care. This will involve cross-organisation, cross-specialty working and relationships and the changing of patient pathways and integration of services through a multidisciplinary team approach. We will build on the substantial work delivered through the perioperative medicine leads and the Perioperative Quality Improvement Programme (PQIP), and develop a clear three-year strategy to deliver CPOC with realistic deliverables and realistic timelines. At the core of this will be delivery across the three dimensions – improving the quality of healthcare, improving the health of the population, and achieving value and financial stability. 

However, for me the real excitement about CPOC is the opportunities that it presents to really improve the perioperative journey for our patients, to change outcomes, and potentially to improve all of our working lives. It also offers the opportunity for anaesthesia to work with all the myriad of stakeholders across all four ‘home’ nations – patients, surgeons, physicians, GPs, nurses, and allied health professionals – and to lead this development to deliver tangible outcomes and results.

How will we gauge the success of this project? I think this will be about having grasped those opportunities to improve quality patient care with transformational change, best practice, and helping patients help themselves. At the same time the opportunity to develop new training and workforce models, deliver research and innovation across a wider specialty base, and influence national and international healthcare policy around the patient perioperative pathway.

Your role

So, what could be your role in CPOC, and what are the opportunities for anaesthesia, pain management and ICM? Hopefully, this website will encourage and inspire you to get involved in the programme. There will be much more released over the coming months, but in order to achieve this ambitious project I have a series of ‘asks’ of you – I ask that you have a commitment to listen, that you are bold in your thinking, that you ensure that your voice is heard, and that you play your part to help shape the future.

There will be a series of leadership roles within and around CPOC that you may wish to get involved in, but I would also like to hear your views on where you see the opportunities to take CPOC forward. While I cannot promise that every proposal will be adopted, I can promise that they will be read and considered.