We asked Emily a few questions about her experience of being a member of the NCAA Steering Group.
What is your professional experience with/relationship to cardiac arrests?
Like all anaesthetic trainees I regularly attend cardiac arrest calls, both in-hospital arrests and out of hospital arrests brought into the emergency department. As an ITU junior I also go to calls on the wards for medical emergencies and peri-arrests.
I am an Advanced Life Support (ALS) instructor and I am a member of the Immediate Life Support (ILS) subcommittee for the Resuscitation Council (UK) (RC [UK]). In this role I have helped to produce a lot of the teaching material for the course and I’ve really enjoyed combining my clinical and practical experience with teaching and involvement with RC (UK).
How long have you been a member of the steering group and what were your reasons for becoming a member?
I was fortunate enough to be invited to be a junior doctor representative for the NCAA steering group in 2015 when I was a foundation year 2 doctor in Bristol. I am grateful to those senior colleagues who encouraged me to apply and pointed me in the right direction. At this stage of my training I was already developing an interest in resuscitation and had undertaken several resuscitation-based projects. I have also been a member of the ILS subcommittee for RC (UK) since 2013. Being invited to be a member of the NCAA steering group has been great as it has given me broader experience and I’ve learnt so much in a short space of time. As a junior, getting involved in organisations like NCAA is invaluable training and it would be good if more national bodies also opened their doors to junior representatives – we also have a lot to contribute!
What do you think the key changes and developments have been in this time?
Over my time as a member of the NCAA steering group we have focused on building a solid data set with good hospital participation. There has been a focus on making the reports more readable and useful to the contributing hospitals. Over the past couple of years, the dataset has also been used to support research with hopefully more to come in the future!
Has the steering group faced any major challenges and, if so, how have you overcome these?
One of the challenges we have faced is defining low event rate hospitals and focusing on making the NCAA reports more relevant to these hospitals. In particular, Dr Sophie Skellett has done a lot of work here with the paediatric hospitals.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with our participants and wider audience?
I hope to be heading off to Australia later this year for a spell as an ITU registrar before coming back to UK training in ITU and anaesthetics.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Emily for agreeing to be interviewed and the NCAA Steering Group as a whole for their ongoing support.
If you have any questions about NCAA, please contact the NCAA Team.