Fellowship in the Clinical Neuropathology of Hyperacute Brain Injury

Job summary

We are delighted to offer this opportunity for an individual with a passion for the study of brain injury to join our team. Our Centre for Excellence places an academic focus on three major clinical domains: Head Injury, Cardiac Arrest, Patient Experience & Outcomes.

We believe that there are major opportunities to improve outcomes for both head injury and cardiac arrest and we intend to be at the forefront of discovery in these areas. The very early phase of patient care takes place at the incident scene with the potential for myriad opportunities for intervention, long before a patient arrives in hospital.

For the brain, our philosophy is that a cascade of reversible and treatable pathological processes starts at the scene, and that it is during this often-forgotten phase of care that opportunities can flourish. Brain injury occurs immediately following head injury and cardiac arrest. Our clinical and academic service exists to improve patient experience and outcomes in this hyperacute phase of the patient journey.

We would like to recruit a highly motivated clinician or scientist with a background in neurosurgery, neuropathology or neuroscience. In this part time role, we anticipate the post-holder working alongside their standard commitments, for example, a clinical or scientific career.

Applications must be made on the EHAAT application form available at ehaat.org/about-us/careers-employment/

Main duties of the job

This role is focussed on head injury, with an inevitable interface with our work on cardiac arrest, maximising opportunities for discovery across different pathological aetiologies. Traumatic Brain Injury can have an enormous impact on patients and their families, and we are motivated to lessen this burden by innovating for them, and with them.

The fellow will work alongside our team to deliver on a key component of our strategy, to investigate the prehospital phase in a cohort of suspected and proven TBI patients. We will correlate pre-hospital clinical biomarkers with very early clinical findings and interventions, together with the pathology diagnosed on imaging, the clinical trajectory whilst in hospital, outcome data and autopsy data for those who dont reach hospital alive. We also aim to extend the pre-hospital phase by investigating the pre-injury phase using health records to identify further biomarkers that may be associated with good or poor outcome.

The fellow will be responsible for collating and analysing data from a retrospective cohort and creating a prospective study. Each patient will be used as a case study and the entire episode investigated. The project will be supported by appropriate ethics review processes, and the involvement of our Patient and Public Involvement groups. The fellow will develop regression models for identifying correlations between pre-hospital biomarkers and pathological subgroups identified on imaging or by clinical trajectory.

About us

It is our pleasure to extend a warm welcome to you as you consider joining the Essex & Herts Air Ambulance (EHAAT) and Centre for Excellence Team. This is an incredibly exciting time at EHAAT as we deliver the vision of the Centre for Excellence, to create a world-leading community through which pre-hospital care is developed to achieve the best possible outcomes for all patients.

There are four pillars to the Centre for Excellence; Research and Scholarship, Innovation, Education and Training, and Community. These pillars will support the three clinical domains of cardiac arrest, head injury and patient experience and outcomes.

Achieving clinical excellence sits at the centre of our ambitions with patient experience and outcomes encompassing all activity. Through a targeted research strategy across all three domains, an active scholarship and academic programme, innovative means to train and educate ourselves, our partners and our wider community and disseminating and sharing good clinical practice we aim to change the face of pre-hospital care within the region and beyond.