Health and wellbeing!

Everyday, hospitals rely on blood to save lives. Matching blood groups is vital for safe transfusions. This is challenging due to limited availability of specific blood groups, lack of knowledge of a patient’s blood group in an emergency and the short shelf life of certain blood components. Scientists at NHSBT are looking to create blood that could be transfused to anyone, regardless of their blood group. Join us to find out more about this exciting project, its recent progress and how this approach could ensure that your future blood donations will aid even more people.

Heart transplantation can be life-saving, but making sure donor hearts are suitable, reliable, and able to reach the patients who need them is a major challenge. In this talk, I will explore patient-centred care in heart transplantation, including my work to improve how donor hearts are assessed before transplant, as well as wider research aimed at helping hearts travel further safely and encouraging greater patient and public involvement in transplantation. By improving each step of the process, this work aims to increase heart transplant rates in the UK and save as many lives as possible.

Dr Toshner leads a group in Cambridge with an interest in using apps, wearables and sensors to drive innovation in cardiorespiratory clinical trials and clinical practice. Specifically he is interested in how we use technology to make trials easier to sign up to and take part in for patients and participants.