RCoA Nominations Committee announce awards

The College is delighted to announce details of awards from the May 2021 meeting of the RCoA Nominations Committee:

Professor Tim Cook OBE has been awarded the Gold Medal, our highest award to a Fellow of the College in recognition of sustained work for the College at the highest level. Professor Cook’s many and ongoing contributions to the College, anaesthesia and patient safety, both nationally and internationally, include National Audit Projects, research into airway management and No-Trace-Wrong-Place. During the pandemic, he contributed huge amounts of work into creating valuable guidance for the COVID-19 Hub website which is accessed across the world.  

FRCA Primary and FRCA Final exam leads  - FRCA Primary exam leads Dr Roger Sharpe, Dr Jo Budd, Dr Emily Simpson, Dr Sian Jaggar, Dr Patrick Hopton, Dr Tim Clarke, Dr Gudrun Kunst, Dr Carl Stevenson, Dr Jamie Macdonald, Dr John Donnelly and Dr Simon Vaughan have been awarded the President’s Commendation for their work taking exams online. FRCA Final exam leads Dr Kevin O’Hare, Dr Gary Lear, Dr Arun Krishnamurthy, Dr Satya Francis, Dr Elaine Wilson-Smith, Dr Ros Bacon, Dr Claire Mearns, Dr Sameh Abdul-latif and Professor Cyprian Mendonca have also been awarded the President’s Commendation for their work, taking the exams online. An enormous amount of work was undertaken by this group in order to implement an entirely new way of examining within a period of six months, therefore allowing anaesthetists in training to continue sitting exams during the pandemic.

Professor Tom Gale has been awarded a College Medal and Dr Caroline Evans has been awarded a President’s Commendation for their work on recruitment for the specialty. Following the cancellation of all face-to-face recruitment activity in March 2020, both Dr Gale and Dr Evans worked with the College and Health Education England representatives to establish and implement measures which have allowed subsequent recruitment rounds to run successfully, often in the face of significant challenges and system pressures.

Dr Soumen Sen has been awarded a President’s Commendation for his work on the new curriculum. Whilst he was a KSS/RCOA Education Fellow, he played a key role in the curriculum development group by representing the group to a number of Anaesthetist in Training stakeholders, providing valuable feedback for the development of a trainee guide, as well as making a significant contribution to the FAQs on the College website.

Professor Fang Gao-Smith has been awarded the Dudley Buxton Medal for her contribution to academic anaesthesia. Professor Gao-Smith’s extensive career in research has generated new knowledge in anaesthesia, intensive care and pain medicine and to date, has published 262 scientific papers. Her collaborative research covers such diverse topics as the cytokine cascade in sepsis, the role of Vitamin D in ARDS and patient involvement in research.

North Central London adult critical care transfer service leadership team has been awarded the Humphry Davy award, for their work during the first COVID-19 wave. This service was developed very rapidly in April 2020 and showed exemplary team-working under extreme pressure, whilst at the same time affording a multitude of training opportunities for trainees during the pandemic.

Dr Sally Nash has been awarded the Fellow ad eundem. Dr Nash is a Consultant Anaesthetist based at the Royal Cornwall Hospital. She has been an educational supervisor for 12 years and has expertise in obstetric anaesthesia, recently succeeding to the post of Lead Obstetric anaesthetist.

If you wish to find out more about College awards, please visit the Awards and Honours page.