Royal Papworth Hospital

I was privileged to study a lot of my medicine at Cambridge, and I did my surgical rotation at Cambridge.

And in my surgical rotation, I spent six months at Papworth Hospital.

You know, world-leading cardiac hospital, brilliant people there.

And I would spend probably two out of the five days of the week doing three cardiac artery by-- coronary artery bypass grafts, um, a day.

and a bunch of geriatrics in a ward in the cardiology ward like I was doing electrodes all over my chest sprinting up and down treadmills um core scans my heart seeing oxygenated and deoxygenated blood pumping around my heart.

Really cool in Royal Papworth Hospital.

So like the best place to have this kind of research done.

And they went, you know, nothing structurally wrong with your heart.

Today, we welcome Dr. Paula Appenzeller, the first author of the manuscript entitled Long-Term Effects of Medical Therapy Pre and Post Pulmonary Endarterectomy, Insights from the UK Curate Registry.

Paula is joining us from Cambridge in the UK, where she works in the National Pulmonary Vascular Diseases Unit at Royal Papworth Hospital.

Paula, thanks so much for being here.

Before we get into the paper, please tell us about yourself.

Thank you, Kee and Erika.

Thank you so again, also for inviting me to be on the podcast with you today.

I'm currently working as a clinical research fellow at the Pulmonary Vascular Disease Unit at Royal Papworth Hospital here in Cambridge.

But I'm originally from Switzerland and have been working with Professor Sylvia Ulrich in Zurich on research in pulmonary hypertension and high altitude medicine since 2015.

If you think of some places like Stoke Mandeville, so that's an area for quaternary care service.

For cardiothoracic care, for example, you would think somewhere like Royal Papworth Hospital.

So in that sense, gender service, when it was established, national and there was only one main national clinic it sat in the category of a highly specialist centralized care now the problem with that kind of setup is that it is centralized in one area and because of that there is a disparity There is a problem with access.

The waiting list can be very long and everybody needed to travel to get to that place and people need to travel long distances and waiting list will naturally become longer because all of the demand is concentrated in one place.