Visit of Israeli Colorectal Surgeons
On Monday 2nd March 2020 the Association hosted the group of visiting Israeli Colorectal Surgeons led by Prof Alex Deutsch (Beilinson Hospital, Petach Tikva) and Dr Reuven Weil (Hasharon Hospital, Petach Tikva).
The visit was supported by the Israel, Britain and the Commonwealth Association John Firman Fund and the David Yanir Foundation.
While in the UK they were the guests of Mr Richard Cohen (University College London Hospital), Mr Joseph Nunoo-Mensah (Kings College Hospital) and Mr Andrew Williams (St Thomas’s Hospital), and attending a course at Basingstoke Hospital.
The following visitors (with their hospital affiliation) took part: Dr Elad Boaz (Shaarei Zedek Hospital, Petach Tikva) Dr Rabia Darwasha (Barzilai Hospital, Ashkelon) Dr Yael Feferman (Rabin Medical Centre, Petach Tikva) Dr Vladimir Gaziantis (Shamir Medical Centre, Tzrifin) Dr Asaf Harbi (Rambam Hospital, Haifa) Dr Dror Karni (Haemek Medical Centre, Afula) Dr Muhammad Mansour (Galilee Medical Centre, Nahariyah) Dr Igor Markovich (Hasharon Hospital, Petach Tikva) Dr Mai Mazarieb (Beilinson Hospital, Petach Tikva) Dr Yaron Rudnicki (Meir Hospital, Kfar Saba) Dr Ken Dror Shai (Meir Hospital, Kfar Saba) Dr Alon Wachtel (Kaplan Hospital, Rehovot) After a reception there was a discussion meeting on the topic of Gut Neuroendocrine Tumours – “NET: for any surgeon or not?”The session was introduced by Prof Deutsch. Two cases of neuroendocrine tumours were presented, from Drs Feferman and Ken Dror.
This was followed by an authoritative review of the subject from Prof Martyn Caplin (Professor of Gastroenterology and Neuroendocrine Tumour Biology, Royal Free Hospital and University College London) and Prof Maralyn Druce (London Association Chair and Professor of Endocrine Medicine and Consultant Physician and Endocrinologist, Barts Health NHS Trust).
On her return to Israel Dr Fefernan wrote to thank the Association for their hospitality. She said that she was honored to receive the scholarship and was grateful for the opportunities it provided. In the UK she was attached to University College London Hospital. While there she had learned about the UK healthcare system, and the methods of organization and provision. From a clinical perspective she had the opportunity to observe several operations. She was especially grateful to Mr. Richard Cohen for his personally care and attention.
A visit to the House of Lords had been arranged for the group, and Dr Fefernan said that she was fortunate to be shown round by Lords Polak and O'Shaughnessy, whose stories and insights about small things that reflected centuries of British culture and civilization. The Colorectal Diseases Masterclass (M25) at Basingstoke was very well organized and she felt she had learned a great deal from it. Overall the experience had her abilities as a young colorectal surgeon, and she looked forward to implementing what she had learned both about working conditions and cancer treatment on her return to Israel.
Alternative strategies to maintain suppression of Covid-19 transmission in the UK
Speaker: Dr Ellis Friedman [Director of Public Health (retired), expert COVID-19 advisor to the British Medical Association and Treasurer of the Faculty of Public Health]
On June 9, the UK had the worst public perception of handling of the pandemic across a wide range of nations. Is this perception justified?
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Hallucinations, ICU and Recovery of a Covid Patient
Speaker: Laurie Wiseman
Laurie Wiseman was a patient at the Royal Free Hospital for 26 days. He was admitted the day before lockdown in March, diagnosed with Covid 19, spent five days on a ventilator and 12 days in ICU. He was discharged on 16th April.
61 year-old Laurie has a particular perspective on his experience. He has been involved in digital health for the past 30 years. He founded Primal Pictures, creators of the world’s first complete 3D computer graphic model of human anatomy for medical education. and remains at the forefront of digital transformation in healthcare. How does he view the patient experience?
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Tuesday 30th June: 20:00
Dr Karyn Moshal is a consultant in the Department of Infectious Diseases at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust, and Sepsis Lead for the Hospital.
Dr Moshal graduated from the University of Cape Town, trained in General Paediatrics in London (UCL and Imperial affiliated hospitals) and completed a Fellowship in Paediatric Infectious Diseases at the Children’s Hospital, Philadelphia. In 2004 she founded the NGO CHIVA Africa, in response to the HIV pandemic and the crisis in South Africa. She remains Chairman of both the South African and UK Trustees. This organization has trained and mentored more than 20,000 health care professionals - responsible for the care of hundreds of thousands of children - in the provision of quality HIV treatment and long-term management, giving them the practical skills to save lives and improve the quality of life of these young people. She received Rotary International’s Paul Harris Award, the CHIVAS Humanitarian Award (South Africa) and the South African Achiever Award in the Health Care sector for this work.
Speaker: Prof Marcel Levi
Prof Levi is Chief Executive of University College London Hospital (UCLH) and Professor of Medicine at UCL.
Prof Levi studied medicine, specialised and completed his PhD in Amsterdam, and is a Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science. He worked at the University of Perugia, Italy and the Center for Transgene Technology and Genetherapy, University of Leuven, Belgium. His specific interests are haemostasis and thrombosis, vascular medicine, and angio-edema. He published over 700 articles, received several international research awards, and elected FRCP. He was Dean, University of Amsterdam Faculty of Medicine and Chair, Executive Board, Amsterdam Academic Medical Centre, before moving to UCL in 2017.
CE Prof Levi and colleagues published a review “Coagulation abnormalities and thrombosis in patients with COVID-19” (11/05/2020, Lancet Haematology 7: e438-40).
You can watch a recording of the event here.
The story of COVID-19 and a ‘new’ CPAP respiratory support device
Prof Mervyn Singer is Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at UCL, an emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator, co-editor of the Oxford Textbook of Critical Care, was co-chair of the “Sepsis-3’ international consensus group that redefined sepsis, and is current Chair of the International Sepsis Forum. He will talk about the engineering of the continuous positive airways pressure (CPAP) device – 10,000 were produced in four weeks.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Speaker: Dr Mike Groszmann
Consultant and Clinical Lead, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, UCLH and UCL Medical School
Joint Honours, Psychology / Neurosciences (Manchester) and Medicine graduate (Imperial College, London). Psychiatry training at the Royal Free and the Tavistock Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Higher Training Programme (including various psychotherapy models). Special interests in Adolescence, Neuropsychiatry, Psycho-Oncology, Paediatric Liaison and Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy.
Lead Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist managing acute psychiatric admissions to the only North Central London general paediatric ward operational during lockdown, based at Great Ormond Street Hospital. I will share observations, experiences and trends about the pandemic impact on children and young people, relating to mental health requiring medical care; and how services had to reconfigure to maintain safety and meet clinical need
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Speaker: Dr Daniel Staetsky, Senior Research Fellow; Director of the European Jewish Demography Unit, Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR)
Dr Daniel Staetsky (MA Demography, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; PhD Social Statistics, Southampton), specialises in Jewish, European, Israeli and Middle Eastern demography. He focuses particularly on major puzzles of contemporary demography, of which Jewish longevity is one.
There is elevated Jewish mortality from COVID-19 in England and Wales. Clarifying why is vital, and has serious policy consequences. British BAME have well-documented ill health and vulnerability, but Jews are “long-lifers” making Jewish COVID-19 data rather incomprehensible. Do Jews resemble BAME with respect to the underlying vulnerability and this has been overlooked previously, or is Covid-19 an aberration? Does this relate to a particular Jewish subgroup (eg haredi)? Dr Staetsky will discuss possible reasons for the elevated Jewish mortality, and outline useful directions to be explored further.
You can watch a recording of the webinar here.
Speaker: Prof Ora Paltiel
Senior Physician, Dept. of Hematology, Hadassah Ein Karem; Professor of Epidemiology and Director Hadassah Research Centre in Clinical Epidemiology; former Director, Braun School of Public Health, Hadassah-Hebrew University.
Prof Paltiel (Medicine and Epidemiology, McGill University, Canada) combines haematology research and clinical work with studies of lymphoma genetic, viral and environmental risk factors among Israelis and Palestinians. She is a co-investigator in the Jerusalem Perinatal Cohort study; a member of the Directorate of Israel’s Quality Indicators Program in Community Healthcare; and directed the International Master’s Programme in Public Health.
International comparisons are constantly raised in discussions about the Covid 19 pandemic. After apparently coping with an earlier outbreak, in the past month Israel has been severely affected. One of the most frequent questions about the pandemic is about the role of children and how they influence the pattern of disease. Prof Paltiel will discuss the Israeli Covid-19 response, focusing on the role of children in particular.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Speaker: Dr Ian Goodman
Dr Ian Goodman is a GP in Northwood and Chair of the Hillingdon CCG. He is chair of the Whole Systems Integrated Care Database Population Health Board and co-chair of the NW London Digital Strategy Board. He is a graduate of Cambridge University Medical School and did his GP training on the Northwick Park Vocational Training Scheme
Dr Goodman’s particular interests are the application of digital solutions to General Practice, General Practice Organisation and Care of the Elderly.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Speaker: Professor Alan Salama
Prof Alan Salama is a Consultant in Nephrology and director of the UCL Department of Renal Medicine, at the UCL Faculty of Medical Sciences. He specializes in immunological kidney diseases, with expertise in vasculitis, autoimmunity and transplantation. Alan trained in Oxford and in London at The London Hospital, Guy’s Hospital and The Hammersmith Hospital, completing a PhD at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School and a post-doctoral period at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
Alan will discuss the impact COVID19 had on the kidneys of those patients without previous kidney disease, on those on dialysis, and with transplants; and outline the preparations needed for Part 2.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Speaker: Dr Suzanne Joels
Consultant Psychiatrist in Old Age; Clinical Director for Services for Ageing and Perinatal Mental Health at Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust (2010-); Clinical Lead for Dementia at NHS London Dementia Clinical Network (2019-).
Dr Joels qualified at the Middlesex, completed GP training, and then Psychiatry Training at the Royal Free. Old age psychiatry attracted her – it retains medical skills, and offers a diverse range of conditions and presentations of mental illness in the context of a rich complex biography allowed real insights into the individual. She became aware of the impact of institutionalised ageism: older adults voices were rarely heard / advocated in service design. This led to a second career in medical management, while working clinically in the Camden Memory Service and Camden Frailty Network.
Dr Joels will cover some developments over the past 10 years in dementia care, some of the current thinking behind the epidemiology and risk factors, and look at how people with dementia have fared in the pandemic.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Speaker: Dr Adrian Tookman
Medical Director, Marie Curie Hospice, Hampstead; Trustee / Medical Advisory Panel lead, Chai Cancer Care; Chair, RCGP End of Life Care Primary Care Planning Group weekly meeting.
Dr Adrian Tookman is a Palliative Care Physician and has worked for Marie Curie for 35 years. He is also ex-medical Director, Royal Free NHS Trust
Dr Tookman will be focus on the impact of COVID on end of life care and the potential unintended consequences of the pandemic. He will include discussion arising from weekly RCGP meetings that have been held for the last six months to ensure that potential consequences can be mitigated. This weekly meeting is attended by national experts from a wide range of settings who advise the RCGP.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Speaker: Prof Tim Spector
Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Director of TwinsUK
Tim Spector is a Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College London and honorary consultant Physician at Guys and St Thomas’ Hospitals. He is also an expert in personalised medicine and the gut microbiome and started the famous UK Twin Registry in 1993. He is lead researcher behind the world’s biggest citizen science health project – the Covid Symptom study app.
Prof Spector will discuss how Artificial Intelligence and citizen science came together to create the Covid symptom study app to accelerate testing, support contact tracing, expedite any future lockdowns and predict future virus waves by region.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Why people go along with authority, why they follow COVID measures ….and how the UK Government has blown it
Speaker: Prof Stephen Reicher (Wardlaw Professor of Psychology, University of St. Andrews)
Steve Reicher is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Currently he sits on SPI-B (the Behavioural Science Advisory Group to SAGE), and the Scottish CMO Advisory Group. He is also a member of Independent SAGE. His work is on social identity and group processes. He has researched topics such as crowd behaviour, leadership, conformity and obedience, intergroup hatred and the psychology of tyranny.
Steve will contrast two different approaches to the psychology of the pandemic: the one rooted in a notion of individual fragility and ‘panic’ under conditions of crisis, the other based on the notion of collective resilience which flows from the emergence of a sense of shared identity when people faced a common threat. He will analyse the ways in which shared identity impacts adherence, mutual support and mental (as well as physical) well-being. He will consider how leadership can serve either to buttress or undermine shared identity. Ultimately the success with which authorities handle the pandemic is dependent upon whether they treat the public as the problem or as the solution and are able to work in partnership with the community in order to limit transmission of infection.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Prof Ora Paltiel (Senior Hematologist, Hadassah; Professor of Epidemiology, Braun School of Public Health, Hadassah / Hebrew University)
She graduated BSc from University of Toronto; and MD MSc. from McGill University, where she trained in Internal Medicine, Haematology and Oncology, and Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Her main research focus is Cancer Epidemiology.
During the Covid crisis she has focused on international policy comparisons, the collateral damage of these policies for patients with acute non-Covid-related conditions, and the role of children and school closures in the pandemic.
The objectives of her talk are to learn about the epidemiology of the first, second and third waves of SARS-Cov2 infection in Israel; and to relate aspects of Israel’s epidemic to the country’s demographic and health.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Prof Sir Michael Marmot (Professor of Epidemiology at UCL since 1985, where he set up the Whitehall II and Ageing Longitudinal Studies) inter alia conducted the British Government’s 2008 Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England post 2010 ['Fair Society, Healthy Lives' (2010)], followed by the European Review of Social Determinants of Health and the Health Divide (2014). He was author of The Health Gap: the challenge of an unequal world (2015), and recently published Health Equity in England: Marmot Review 10 Years On (2020). He chaired the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health (2005) reported in ‘Closing the Gap in a Generation’ (2008) and is Advisor to the WHO Director-General. He was President of the BMA and the WMA. A more detailed biosketch listing his past and current activities and numerous honours and awards, can be accessed here.
In his talk he will explain how addressing health inequalities is social justice, and that strategies for tackling health inequalities need to confront the social gradient in health not just the worst off and everybody else. National policies make a difference. Much can be done, but policies and interventions need to address how people are born, grow, live, work and age. Economic circumstances are important but not sole drivers of health inequalities. Resolving the health gap needs evidence based action across society. The pandemic has exposed and amplified underlying inequalities in society that lead to inequalities in health. A full abstract of his talk can be accessed here.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Chronic respiratory care in the time of Covid-19, and Post-Covid clinics
Speaker: Dr Nicola Marks
Nicola Marks trained at Cambridge University and Eastern Region, with research at Hammersmith Hospital. She is a respiratory consultant at the Whittington Hospital
Nicola will review how our respiratory out-patients has been managing since March, caring for chronic respiratory patients, as well as new reviews; with the added burden of Covid-19 follow-up reviews and referrals.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Speaker: Miss Joanna Franks
Consultant Breast and Oncoplastic Surgeon, UCLH
Miss Franks qualified from Imperial College Medical School, and trained in the London Deanery, including time in the Oncoplastic Breast Unit and Macmillan Cancer Centre at UCLH. She sees and treats patients who present to the symptomatic clinic, those who have been recalled via the NHS breast screening programme, and those from a high-risk family background. She chairs the UCLH breast multidisciplinary team and the Breast Board for HCA UK
She was one of the Pan-London Breast Hub Co-ordinators managing the regional response to COVID, prioritising patient safety and ensuring capacity for time critical breast cancer surgery, including the reintroduction of complex and reconstructive breast surgery at the earliest opportunity
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Speaker: Ruth Waitzberg
Research Scholar, Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, Jerusalem, Israel and Dept of Healthcare Management, Technical University, Berlin
Ruth Waitzberg is a Hebrew University graduate in public policy, and is completing her PhD. She is currently the Israeli representative to the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, a network of health policy researchers from > 30 countries working together to improve policymaking worldwide. Her research covers payment to health providers and financial incentives, health insurance, access to care, policy evaluation, health and long-term care systems, and international comparisons
European health systems differ in their features, level of funding, density of resources and workforce, and organization of service provision. COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges to all health systems, even the most generous and prepared. Many public health measures to prevent transmission were implemented across most countries, such as limiting movement of individuals, imposing physical distancing, and mandating use of face masks. Yet, the way through which health systems re-organized to treat COVID-19 patients while maintaining essential services to non-COVID-19 patients diverged. We will review different strategies used in European countries and Israel to mobilize resources and workforce to meet pressing needs. We will discuss how governance influenced health system’s responses to COVID-19 so far, and what we can learn to better respond to future waves.
You can watch a recording of the event here.
Prof Stanley J Weiss - Prof of Medicine, Dept of Medicine and Prof of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.
Prof Weiss graduated from Yale (Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry) and Harvard (Medicine, Infectious Diseases). He has worked at the National Cancer Institute in Medical Oncology and Epidemiology, and has been honoured by the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association as having made “a significant contribution to addressing a public health issue of major importance by applying epidemiological methods”. He is past chair of the International Joint Policy Committee of the Societies of Epidemiology (now the International Network for Epidemiology in Policy, INEP).
Prof Weiss will talk about how, in the context of the pandemic, research evidence is being published and cited, utilised for policy decision making, etc, and about some of the flaws that might be relevant to those decisions.
ou can watch a recording of the event here.