October – New Academic Year and A New WICM Chair

New academic year – new blog post!

Hello – I’m Liz Thomas – a consultant in intensive care medicine and anaesthesia and I am delighted to have taken over the role of Chair of the WICM committee from Dr Rosie Baruah. I have been on the WICM committee for almost 12 months.

A little bit about me – I work at Stockport NHS Foundation Trust and I am also Clinical Director for critical care at my hospital. I’ve been a consultant for 7 years now and I love my job . I am lucky to have the combination of clinical work in intensive care medicine and anaesthesia, the managerial role which allows me to influence how the critical care works and showcase critical care to the wider hospital management, the work with our regional ICM network and the other facets it involves, such as local and regional medical education. When I’m not at work, I sing as much as possible (classical choral – I am in The Halle Choir and a few other choirs) and I am married with two small children who I love exploring the world with.

The WICM committee have achieved a lot of the last 3 years – the inaugural ‘striking the balance’ meeting last September was well attended and had excellent feedback from participants (keep your eyes peeled as we have an exciting programme lined up for the next meeting we have when the pandemic is over), the first cohort of  WICMEL (Women in Critical care Emerging Leadership) Fellows are approaching the end of their programme and plans are in place for recruitment to the next cohort. We are very active on social media – with a full and varied blog programme, providing numerous blog posts and on twitter we have showcased leadership and some of our members have kindly written “tweet my week” to highlight the variety and joys of a career in intensive care medicine. We aim to promote ICM as a career for all.

We have a lot of upcoming things planned – I won’t spoil all the surprises here, but we are keen to work to promote intensive care medicine as a career for all, and to help increase the numbers of women ICM consultants as the Faculty census still shows that only approximately 20% of ICM consultants are women, despite slightly over 50% of medical school entrants are women.

The committee has 12 members, 10 consultants and 2 trainee members. We are a working party and all committee members have projects they are working on to build on the work already done and to promote WICM. We are also keen to involve the wider field of women in intensive care medicine, so if you have any ideas or are keen to be involved in our projects then get in touch!

Contact WICM: wicm@ficm.ac.uk

Twitter: @WomenICM