Paediatric heart and lung surgeon Martin Elliott is one of the longest standing doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital, leading ground-breaking research and treating thousands of patients over the past 30 years.
Professor Elliott, 64, has had the pleasure of seeing many of the patients he treated as young children reach adulthood thanks to his surgery and care.
He helped set up paediatric heart and lung transplantation at Great Ormond Street and then led the thoracic transplantation team for many years.
His work has bridged the gap between surgery and research with skills ranging from heart-bypass surgery to correcting congenital lung disorders.
It also paved the way for the first ever transplant of a child's trachea, or windpipe, supported by stem cells. The operation, which was carried out on a seriously ill 13-year-old child in 2010, replaced a patient’s trachea with a donor windpipe laced with the patient's own stem cells so it would not be rejected.
The child is now doing well, and on no drugs.
There are few staff at the hospital as experienced as Professor Elliott, so much so that he is in high demand internationally as a speaker. Always trying to make the hospital an even better place for patients, he’s not afraid to try new things.
He consulted Formula 1 teams to ensure GOSH’s cardiac people were working together in the best possible way and spoke to the best in the airline and hotel industries to understand how they reached the top of their game and see what the hospital could learn.
