Chief Perfusionist, Barts Health NHS Trust
John O’Neill joined the College of Clinical Perfusion Scientists in September 2018. He is a college assessor and enjoys learning from and helping other perfusion departments. He is interested in developing the systems and standards of peer review across the profession to promote collective learning.
John's current obsession is solving the many causes of haemolysis on bypass to better care for the increasing complex patient population at Barts. Its for our sickest and most vulnerable patients that our clinical development is needed most.
John trained at Harefield Hospital and qualified in 2007. During his time at Harefield he gained experience in VADs and ECMO and niche transplant centre techniques such as organ care systems and Ex Vivo lung perfusion.
He joined Barts Health in 2009 and became Chief Perfusionist in 2015. In the time that John has been at Barts it has gone from a multi site centre performing around 1000 adult cases per year to a single cardiac site performing over 2000 cases a year after the merger with the cardiac unit of the Heart hospital in 2015. Barts Health has an intra trust ECMO retrieval service and a busy complex aortic surgery service as well as performing Grown Up Congenital Heart (GUCH) surgery. John and his colleagues try to meet and exceed the standards of their profession in an increasingly diverse centre.
John is very interested in Human Factors and has set up a team of Human Factors champions across the MDT of the cardiac service. These staff work together to solve systemic recurrent issues and to improve working relationships through better understanding of different staff groups. John uses human factors theory to improve clinical care by examining the human barriers to best practice.
