Welcome
The University Division of Anaesthesia was formally established in 1991 on the Addenbrookes’s site with Professor J Gareth Jones as the first Head of Department. Departmental facilities are housed adjacent to the NHS Anaesthetic Department, Main Operating theatres, and the John Farman Intensive Care Unit.
In addition to office space, the Department contains an Image Processing Lab (funded by the Royal Society and supported by a high speed departmental network), and laboratory facilities for clinical sample processing.
See below for the research themes our Division focuses on.
The acute brain injury research program of the University of Cambridge Division of Anaesthesia has aimed to understand regional cerebral pathophysiology to advance the care of critically ill patients after brain injury, from initial ictus, through recovery from coma and rehabilitation, to final outcome.
The aim of the Consciousness and Cognition group is twofold. We investigate both the neural basis of consciousness and the neural basis for poor cognitive outcome following traumatic brain injury.
The Critical Care Biology Group aims to elucidate the mechanisms underlying development of conditions occurring in the critically ill such as sepsis, nosocomial infection, and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).
In collaboration with the NIHR Global Health Research Group on Neurotrauma and others we are working to understand how to improve the provision of perioperative care in resource-poor environments.
In collaboration with the Healthcare Design Group in the Department of Engineering we are exploring how a systems approach can be applied to the improvement of perioperative and anaesthetic care.
Preoperative research in the UDA is evolving around several key themes including risk stratification and prehabilitation, long term outcomes of perioperative events, systems thinking, transplant surgery, and global health. The department is drawing on pre-existing expertise in large scale data analysis and critical care to pursue these, while exploring the research potential of the comprehensive electronic health record present within Addenbrooke’s hospital.
Physiology in Critical Illness
The Physiology in Critical Illness Group carries out a wide range of research into physiological processes related mainly to acute cardiorespiratory illness. We are interested in the experimental study, application and mathematical modelling of physiology in the critically ill.