Mark Borthwick, Consultant Pharmacist in Critical Care at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, received the prestigious Clinical Pharmacist of the Year award from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society on behalf of the Critical Care H1N1 Clinical Guideline Development Group, a partnership between clinicians at the John Radcliffe, Royal Free and University College London Hospitals. The award was presented at a ceremony held at the Commonwealth Club in London on Sunday 11 September 2011.
The award was in recognition of the work that Mark and colleagues from the partner trusts had done to summarise and make available clinical information about treatments for the H1N1 flu (swine flu) after the new strain started spreading in 2009. Because this new strain affected a different group of patients than previous flu variations and caused numerous admissions to intensive care, new guidelines for critical care staff to aid in treating the condition were necessary.
Mark Borthwick, Consultant Pharmacist Critical Care at the John Radcliffe Hospital said: "I was delighted to accept this award with colleagues from the Royal Free Hospital in London and University College London Hospital. We had noticed that we were seeing a rather different mix of patients on our critical care units with swine flu, and as a result, we had to use some unfamiliar medications. We felt it was important that we were able to share expertise across the country about what was working well in treating this new strain of virus in a group of patients who were often very vulnerable because of immune deficiencies."
The team published and maintained a clinical guideline on the management of H1N1 infection in critically ill patients. The guideline was produced during a period of enormous pressure on critical care services – during the winter of 2010 25 percent of critical care beds in England were occupied by patients being treated for flu.
The team were invited to share their expertise by the Health Protection Agency and WHO (World Health Organisation) Europe with other parts of Europe and Russia, after the virus spread in a wave across Europe, moving from east to west across the continent.
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