This is the environment I feel most comfortable in.
Put me in a general practice setting—sitting in a quiet room with a patient—and I get nervous. My hands sweat, my heart races. But in the complex, high-stakes environment of intensive care, I feel completely at home.
I am Matthew Morgan and I just delivered a talk that partially explored the history of intensive care medicine, which dates back to the 1953 polio epidemic in Copenhagen. From those early days, I traced how the specialty has evolved over the decades, and how far we've come in our ability to support critically ill patients.
But my real message to the audience was about something even more important: the need to engage with the public. We must do a better job of explaining what intensive care medicine actually is, the uncertainties we face, and the delicate balance between what we can do and what we should do.
They say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert—but I tried, in just 15 to 30 seconds, to share my approach to intensive care: it's about teamwork, humanity, and curiosity, as much as it is about science and technology.
I'm proud to be here not just as a speaker, but as part of a research team from Cardiff. And not just physician researchers. I've travelled here with two research nurses, who do the real heavy lifting—recruiting patients, coordinating protocols, ensuring the work actually gets done. I'm also joined by an academic foundation doctor, whose enthusiasm and insight keep our team fresh and forward-looking.
Because the reality is this:
Research in medicine is a team game.
And coming to conferences like this—not just as individuals, but as a team—is hugely beneficial for learning, for collaboration, and for building the future of our specialty.
