Perioperative and Intensive Care Research Group

Around 184,000 critically ill adults are admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) each year in the UK, over 30% of whom will require help from a ventilator, often in combination with additional oxygen. However, we do not know how much oxygen to give to patients in order to optimise their recovery.

An increasing number of studies have shown that pulse oximeters – which are used throughout the world to measure the level of oxygen in a patient – may over-estimate the true oxygen level in patients with darker (pigmented) skin. This in turn could under-estimate the severity of a patient's illness, leading to them receiving inadequate treatment and come to unnecessary harm.

Liver disease is the third commonest cause of death in adults of working age and liver transplantation (LT) remains the only cure for liver failure. We know that physical frailty prior to surgery results in a longer hospital stay because of postoperative complications and contributes to one in ten patients either dying whilst still on the waiting list or shortly after LT. Exercise may have the potential to improve the lives of people with liver disease and reduce the side-effects of LT surgery in the same way it is used in other fields of elective surgery (e.g. cancer) but LT patients have often been viewed as ‘too sick’ or ‘too frail’ to exercise and there is virtually no data to support the benefits and safety of exercise in this cohort.