A Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Consultant was last week formally announced as President-elect of the Intensive Care Society, whose role is to ensure delivery of the highest quality of critical care to patients across the UK.
Shondipon Laha, who works as a Consultant Intensivist and Anaesthetist at the Trust, was delighted to be officially appointed at the virtual ceremony on Monday and is the first in Preston to take on the role, as well as one of the first to be from Asian background.
Shondipon is also a Honorary Clinical Professor and was a speaker on the night, which was only open to Intensive Care Society members.
He is currently Honorary Treasurer, an Executive and Trustee at the society, and said: “I’m very proud and very excited. There is a lot celebrate!
“I hope I can help deliver change at a national and local level and improve services. I will be leading an all-Parliamentary group that looks at intensive care, looking at developing and improving rehabilitation services for patients, and at staffing levels, although our hospital is better equipped than most with the Major Trauma Centre.”
The Intensive Care Society is the representative body in the UK for intensive care professionals and patients and is dedicated to the delivery of the highest quality of critical care to patients. They perform many functions for the intensive care community, such as the production of guidelines and standards, organising national meetings, training courses and focus groups.
This time last year, Shondipon was awarded honorary chair at the University of Central Lancashire, where he is the research lead for Critical Care and the Trust co-lead for acute research including many of COVID-19 studies. He worked closely with UCLan in developing a system to help position COVID-19 patients effectively and contributed to a lip-reading app (SRAVI) for patients with tracheostomies.
Shondipon will be President-elect for a year, and then President for a two-year term, having been voted in by his fellow members, which number over 3,000.
