Join us to celebrate a special milestone for our new professors and hear about their inspiring career journeys. Doors for this event will open at 16.45, with the lectures to commence at 17.00. A drinks reception will be held immediately after the lecture at 18:00.

Please note that registration will close at midnight the Sunday before the lecture.

Professor David Wood

Changing our understanding of acute recreational drug related harms

Abstract

Almost 9% of adults in England and Wales have used a recreational drug in the last 12 months. Previously there were limited robust data on acute harms and healthcare utilisation related to drug use. To address this, I led the development of the European Drug Emergencies Network Plus (Euro-DEN Plus) project in 2013, a sentinel network of EDs across Europe and neighbouring countries capturing data on these harms. Euro-DEN Plus is now regarded as a novel European indicator of drug-related harms. This project has been complemented by novel techniques such analysis of pooled urine to understand what drugs people are using, and locally developed guidelines to improve the assessment of individuals with acute toxicity by night-time economy staff which have subsequently been adapted as European best practice guidelines.

Biography

David is a Professor of Clinical Toxicology and Consultant Physician at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s Health Partners and King’s College London. He’s a member of the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) and expert advisor to the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA), World Health Organisation and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

His research focuses on the epidemiology of use and harms related to recreational drugs and new psychoactive substances (NPS). In 2013 he co-established European Drug Emergencies Network (Euro-DEN) Plus, a network of European emergency departments gathering data on acute drug/NPS toxicity presentations. Euro-DEN Plus has over 100,000 cases, with over 30 peer-reviewed papers, with data included in ACMD/EUDA risk assessments, the European Drug Report and an online EUDA data explorer.

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Professor Andrew Davies

The changing landscape of UGI surgery – aggregation of marginal gains and personalised treatment

Abstract

In this lecture, I will describe some of the enormous changes that have happened in the field of UGI surgery over the last 25 years, focussing on areas of research interest. These include the aggregation of marginal gains seen in peri-operative pathways for patients undergoing major cancer surgery and a shift towards individualised treatment. I will discuss the development of prehabilitation and survivorship programmes, designed to prepare patients for and recover them from major surgery, and how consensus can lead to greater standardisation.

I will describe my clinical and academic journey in the context of technological advances; the importance of collecting high quality data, international collaboration and multi-disciplinary working. The privilege of working with expert colleagues and mentoring a future generation of clinical academic surgeons will be highlighted.

Biography

Andrew Davies is an Upper GI surgeon at GSTT and honorary Professor at KCL. He obtained a first-class honours BSc and undergraduate medical degree from Edinburgh University before completing the BST programme at GSTT.His registrar training included time at St.Thomas’, the Royal Marsden and King’s liver unit as well as two minimally-invasive surgery fellowships to Pretoria, SA and Pittsburgh, USA. During training, he completed an MD at KCL.

Since 2013, he has led the GSTT oesophago-gastric research group and fostered many collaborations within KCL. He is a lead supervisor of the senior clinical fellow and clinical research fellow programmes and Chief investigator of numerous prospective multi-centre studies. Andrew sits on the editorial board of the BJS and has held committee roles within both the ISDE(research, guidelines) and ESDE (education). His clinical and academic interests include minimally-invasive UGI surgery, prehabilitation and survivorship.