I became involved in the Manchester Academic Critical Care Research Group for a four-month period during my Specialised Foundation Program academic rotation in FY2.

Having read up on Professor McGrath’s research in airway management and tracheostomy care, I emailed hi

m midway through FY1 to enquire about research opportunities. Prof McGrath enthusiastically outlined ongoing projects within the Manchester Academic Critical Care Research Group and suggested possible roles I could take on. I hit the ground running at the start of FY2, collecting data at North Manchester ICU contributing to the GiFT project (Guided Insertion for Tracheostomy), which focused on developing a medical prototype to aid percutaneous tracheostomy insertion.

I was warmly welcomed to Wythenshawe during my academic block, where I worked on various research projects spanning tracheostomy innovation, virtual reality education and recruiting critically ill patients to clinical trials. I continued contributing to GiFT and gained fascinating insights into the world of medical device development and innovation. I also benefitted from the department’s weekly journal club and teaching sessions and completed Good Clinical Practice (GCP) modules, which provided a good foundation in research principles and ethics.

Through working across multiple different research projects, I was given a comprehensive overview of what a career in academia might look like. I learnt to write project protocols, basic statistical analysis, ethics applications, academic writing and developing educational tools. Brendan was keen to get me fully involved and during the rotation, I was fortunate t

o meet many different academics within critical care, anaesthesia and across other disciplines such as engineering and technology.

The four-month rotation provided an opportunity to work flexibly, both at Wythenshawe and remotely. I was responsible for managing my own time and meeting deadlines. This required an initial adjustment period but was a welcome change from the pressures and work patterns of clinical medicine. This independence has equipped me with useful skills in time management and productivity and allowed me space to pursue my interests outside of medicine.

Under Professor McGrath’s supervision, I presented research at national confere

nces and honed my a

cademic writing skills through submitting a manuscript for publication. I gained valuable insight into the realities of clinical research, including working to deadlines, navigating bureaucracy, and understanding the importance of grants and funding streams. This was an invaluable and rare opportunity during foundation training and one I would highly recommend to others! I hope to integrate research within my future career.

I became involved with the Manchester Academic Critical Care research group for four months during my academic foundation year two rotation. Professor McGrath, a national leader in airway research, welcomed me warmly to the team and soon set me up with several opportunities. Considering the challenges that COVID-19 posed, Prof McGrath was very flexible, and I performed most of my work remotely, which suited me. Prof McGrath was keen to ensure that I got the most out of time with them and gave me plenty of opportunities to get involved in paper writing, research methodology, statistics, ethics, and data collection. I also undertook a remote Good Clinical (Research) Practice course (“GCP”) and got stuck in learning to use some statistical analysis packages.

With the Speech and Language Therapy team’s aid at Wythenshawe hospital, we collaborated on several tracheostomy projects. This included an interesting paper looking at tracheostomies and COVID-19 and how that impacts structural and functional laryngeal pathology. Another paper looked at a novel therapy for dysphagia in critical care patients called pharyngeal electrical stimulation.

Additionally, Prof McGrath put me in contact with other academics at the trust, and I was fortunate enough to get involved with a systematic review of hospital-acquired pneumonia under Dr Tim Felton and others’ guidance. This exposed me to a different methodology, and I could appreciate how a detailed systematic review was an essential starting point for many research projects.

I had minimal experience with paper writing before this rotation, and it certainly was a big learning curve. Whilst guiding me, Prof McGrath was keen not to just handhold me through the entire process, which proved very valuable. It meant that I had to discover my own way of writing a paper, and making mistakes on the way was part of that process. I have gotten more out of this experience by being encouraged out of my comfort zone and learning many new skills on the go.

Whilst there were deadlines, it was down to me to manage my time, and this was challenging at times, considering I had just come from a rigid clinical rotation. Whilst sometimes this lack of structure proved daunting, it provided me with the flexibility I had not had before. I could incorporate some clinical time alongside my academic work, and importantly make some time for socialising.

These four months have flown by, and I would greatly recommend this experience to anyone interested in academia. It has been filled with the frustrations of complicated statistics and the highs of finally submitting a paper. As ever, the more effort you put in, the more you will get out, and there is no shortage of academic opportunities. I have thoroughly enjoyed working alongside such experienced academics, and I have certainly learned a lot.

Mark Brown was an Academic Foundation year doctor at Wythenshawe Hospital in Autumn 2022. He was interested in a career in anaesthesia and research using data science.  

<img id=””>Mark says, “I became interested in Professor Brendan McGrath’s work during my final placement on the intensive care unit at Wythenshawe as a medical student. After securing a position within the academic foundation program (AFP), I was able to spend four months during the second year of the foundation program dedicated to research.

“Prof McGrath allowed me to get ‘stuck in’ to research within the Manchester Academic Critical Care (MACC) research group. The opportunity to be involved with several research projects allowed me to develop my quantitative skills with a meta-analysis and secondary analysis of data from the Tracheostomy Care Quality Improvement Program. Prof McGrath was keen to nurture my development using R studio to explore data for myself and the freedom to try new analytical approaches to answer clinical questions. These experiences have helped me to develop as an independent researcher who can think and do research.

“I had the opportunity to be exposed to a large breadth of research including grant applications, clinical trials, PPIE and even device development. A particularly exciting opportunity was to present a piece of work describing airflow characteristics from a computational model of a patient undergoing above-cuff vocalisation (ACV) at the National NIAA Anaesthesia Research Conference. Under the mentorship of Prof McGrath, I have been exposed to a wide variety of research and given the breadth and grounding to understand the field of academic anaesthesia and critical care. 

“The AFP can be a daunting experience, the pressure to produce output and a newfound freedom for self-directed work is very different compared to the experience of ridged clinical placements. While the academic placement allowed me enough clinical time to continue my training as a doctor most of my time was reserved for academia. Importantly, under Prof McGrath’s guidance, I had the flexibility to manage my own time and pursue topics I was interested.

“I have thoroughly enjoyed my time doing research. I cannot recommend the experience with the MACC team enough! A group keen to give young researchers like myself real opportunities to be clinical academics, who also support your development as a professional and enjoy research.”

Jan Hansel is an NIHR-funded Doctoral Fellow in Intensive Care Medicine at the University of Manchester. He holds an honorary clinical appointment at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), and is an ST6 Intensive Care Medicine and Anaesthetics dual trainee in the North West Deanery.

Following a few years of Emergency Medicine training in Iceland and South Africa, his clinical academic journey started in 2021, when he agreed with the North West deanery to pursue an informal academic placement at the Royal Lancaster Infirmary with Prof Andy Smith as part of core anaesthetics training.

“I’ve always taken a great interest in evidence-based medicine, even prior to my foray into proper academic work. At the end of CT1, my Educational Supervisor at the time floated the idea of an ACF in the future, which I took as a hint that I was perhaps a bit too gobby on ward rounds. However, it was not until I got the opportunity to work on a robust and methodologically well-supported large systematic review with meta-analysis looking at approaches to airway management, that I realised I really wanted to join the creative side of that equation.”

He has since first-authored and supervised numerous impactful systematic reviews and meta-analyses, including diagnostic test accuracy reviews, that have featured in multiple international guidelines, most recently the 2025 Difficult Airway Society guidelines for management of unanticipated difficult tracheal intubation in adults. His latest project with the Difficult Airway Society – Airway Terminology and Outcome Measures, funded by the Association of Anaesthetists/Anaesthesia through a National Institute of Academic Anaesthesia grant, resulted in the first international consensus core outcome set for airway management research.

“After my first steps into academia with evidence synthesis, I pursued an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship in Intensive Care Medicine. I secured a position at The University of Manchester, in the MACC ecosystem, under the supervision of Prof Tim Felton. Tim has generously devoted time to me developing my project, looking at the interplay between sepsis immune phenotypes and antibiotic dosing. It is well established that patients with sepsis behave differently in terms of their immune response – some have a very exaggerated response, whereas in other it may be a bit more indolent. It is also known that a surprisingly large proportion of patients in critical care do not achieve high enough concentrations of antibiotics in their bloodstream, even when they are given the ‘correct’ dose. We are exploring whether these observations are somehow connected at the physiological and pharmacokinetic level.”

Jan’s first clinical study, TDM-TIME, which has now completed and has been accepted for publication, has secured various packages of funding, including support from the Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (NIHR203308) and an Intensive Care Society (ICS) New Investigator Award to Jan.

“In TDM-TIME we were able to harness the amazing potential of new Electronic Health Records to rapidly identify participants for the study – even before an antibiotic has been given. Using automated rules that are continuously evaluated by embedded modules, co-designed with systems analysts at MFT’s Clinical Data Science Unit, we are able to not only identify patients quickly, but also remove a layer of bias which might subconsciously be applied when considering individual patients as candidates for research. This has important diversity implications, as we need to do our best to ensure we are including underrepresented groups in our research to improve the generalisability of its findings. We found that new automated technologies can help address this gap to an extent.”

Following on from the encouraging feasibility findings of the TDM-TIME study, Jan developed an NIHR Doctoral Fellowship application with the support of his supervisors, Prof Tim Felton, Prof Paul Dark and Dr Kayode Ogungbenro. The follow-on study, called SIPRES, was awarded £469,000 on the first attempt as part of a three-year fellowship, which he is now undertaking at the University of Manchester. You can read more about the SIPRES study here.

“I’ve maintained a research interest on multiple fronts in both intensive care medicine and anaesthesia, spanning a range of research methodologies, from clinical trial delivery, across bioinformatics to evidence synthesis. The MACC ecosystem in Manchester allows me to build on my strengths and maximise my academic potential. I would highly recommend Manchester to anyone who wants to get stuck into clinical academia and get the most out of it.”

Frankie is an ST6 trainee in anaesthesia in the North Western Deanery. He wanted to get more involved in research, but did not want to undertake a formal higher degree.

Frankie agreed with the School of Anaesthesia that he would undertake a specialist module in research in 2018/19, comprising six months of his ST6 training and counting towards CCT.

“Dr McGrath, my supervisor, has particular research expertise in airway and tracheostomy management in the critically ill, with a wide ranging clinical research portfolio that presented me with a fantastic opportunity to develop my research CV,” Frankie says.

To have some continuity in both anaesthesia and research training, Frankie spent one day per week undertaking research with MACC at Wythenshawe ICU over nine months, with the rest of his time dedicated to anaesthesia training, including on-call commitments.

For three months, Frankie was dedicated to working on full-time research projects, which all added up to a varied 12 months, with six months in total dedicated to research.

Frankie has led on designing a new industry-funded project, including developing the initial research question, literature reviews, developing the protocol, liaising with our funders, costing the study and completing the necessary regulatory approvals.

“I gained invaluable experience in writing grant applications, protocol and IRAS forms, analysing data, presenting and publicising results,” Frankie says.

“I worked with other researchers and R&D managers within MACC to understand how research is conducted locally and nationally. I presented three oral papers at national meeting and two poster presentations.

“I also published two full papers, a letter and four abstracts during my time with MACC. I was supported in attending a clinical research methodology course, anaesthetic research society meetings and national conferences.”

The study planned to start recruiting during Frankie’s time with MACC, and he remains involved as lead author on the subsequent papers and presentations.

MACC was able to support Frankie in completing his Good Research Clinical Practice (GCP) accreditation, attending a research methodology course, presenting at three national meetings, and publishing papers and abstracts, all in the first six months of his appointment.

“I enjoyed my time working with Dr McGrath enormously, for his wonderful support and mentorship,” Frankie says.