Professor Michael Grocott appointed as new member of Sphere’s Medical Advisory Board

Sphere Medical, an innovator company in critical care monitoring and diagnostics equipment, today announces the appointment of Professor Michael Grocott to its Medical Advisory Board. This advisory board helps Sphere Medical to ensure that it maintains excellence in clinical practices and strives for continual quality improvement in order to best support clinical needs.

Professor Michael Grocott

As Professor of Anaesthesia and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Southampton (UoS) and head of the UoS Centre for Human Integrative Physiology, Prof. Grocott is well placed to offer clinical insight into the development and application of Sphere’s Proxima patient-dedicated blood gas analyser. He is also a consultant in Critical Care Medicine at University Hospital Southampton (UHS) and leads the critical care research area of the UHS-UoS NIHR Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit.

Further supporting his clinical expertise, Prof. Grocott has peer review published extensively. He is also the UK national specialty group lead for Anaesthesia, Perioperative Medicine and Pain within the NIHR Clinical Research Network and was the founding director of the UK National Institute of Academic Anaesthesia Health Services Research Centre. He is an elected council member of the Council of the Royal College of Anaesthetists and an elected board member of the UK Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine.

On Sphere’s Medical Advisory Board, Prof. Grocott will work alongside Prof. Jean-Louis Vincent, Professor of Intensive Care at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Head of the Department of Intensive Care, Erasme University Hospital (University of Brussels).  He also joins Prof. Michael Quintel, Director of the Department of Anaesthesiology, Emergency and Intensive Care Medicine at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Dr Thomas Clutton-Brock recently stood down from the advisory board to take up the position as Chair of the Interventional Advisory Procedures Committee at NICE.

Commenting on his appointment, Professor Grocott said:

I am excited by the possibilities that Proxima offers to improve the precision of patient care and delighted to have the opportunity to advise Sphere Medical at this important stage in the development and commercialisation of the system.

Proxima delivers near real time analysis of blood gases, electrolytes and metabolites, at the patient’s bedside.  As an in-line analyser using a closed sampler device, this allows all blood to be returned to the patient and enables rapid and frequent delivery of blood gas results. Proxima can be used to monitor patients across a wide therapeutic range, enabling faster clinical decision making and improved patient outcomes, whilst potentially reducing costs for healthcare payers.