Great Ormond Street Hospital

We- 'cause we've obviously done a lot of community jobs as well as, um, as well as individual homes for people.

So we put a garden on the top of Great Ormond Street because it's, uh, as I'm sure you know-

Yeah, yeah

... it's a series of tower blocks.

And if you are, you can then be referred to a specialist center.

So in the UK at the moment, the UK center is in Great Ormond Street.

But there is another center in Leuven in Belgium.

And actually the way commissioning has been set up is that roughly half of the UK will be referred to Great Ormond Street and half will be referred to Leuven.

And everywhere in the north of the country, north of England and ourselves in Scotland, our patients go to Leuven, where they can be assessed and managed, and then they come back here for, for ongoing management.

So that's been a really interesting development in the management of these kids.

For many years, he served as the chief executive officer, um, of the International Society for Quality in Healthcare.

Before that, he led the quality program of the very well-known Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

He also happens to be a pediatrician.

Glynn, as is our habit, let's give our listeners three questions to consider as they listen today.

And today we are happy to have as guest Professor Joe Eng, who is Senior Research Fellow at the University College London, Queen's Square Institute of Neurology.

Professor Eng has started her career with an MRC Clinical Research Training Fellowship after completing Pediatric Neurology Training at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and Then she went on to complete a PhD in gene therapy at UCL and combining her clinical experience of managing children with incurable life-threatening and life-limiting neurogenetic disorders without any impactful treatments, And combining with her research experience, she decided to combine this in her career and develop a gene therapy for these rare neurogenetic disorders in order to improve the therapeutic landscape for patients with neurological diseases.

So she has developed considerable expertise in translational AAV gene therapy, and has been able to bring some of these treatments all the way to clinical testing and first in human trials.

So we're very excited to hear her voice and I will start.

They were scattered.

And his ashes were scattered at the base of the Peter Pan statue at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London.

I'll come on to why that was in a moment.

But one of the quite touching things about Jim Callaghan's death is that at the time that it happened, Dennis Healy, who would go on to live for quite a bit longer still, but was, of course, Chancellor in Callaghan's government, said, it was only last week that I was at his wife Audrey's funeral with him, and he was looking very unwell then.

They went for Wilson.

But Callaghan's time did come.

On this association with Great Ormond Street Hospital, I've done some digging to try and find out what was going on there.

And basically, it's less his connection than it is Audrey Callaghan's.

He was put onto a life-saving treatment called ECMO, where effectively his blood was taken out of the body, re-oxygenized, and then pumped back into the body.

This, of course, meant that he had to have tubes that were put down into his heart and they went in through the neck obviously this is a baby that's only just been born he was he was put onto ECMO was he 12 hours old by then he was born at two o'clock in the morning maybe roughly about 12 hours old if that he so basically my son was taken off to Great Ormond Street and because I'd had the emergency cesarean and there weren't any beds available At that time when he needed to be transferred, I had to wait back at our local hospital whilst he went off to Great Ormond Street and had this insane life-saving treatment.

So needless to say...

That wasn't the quick, easy water bath that I was expecting to have in the Easter break and get back to uni and just finish up, like literally tie up the first year of my joint English and drama degree and get back for like full force in like September, October when you go back, right? So it was just a crazy journey.