Meet the OR team

You have already met our neurosurgeon, Dr Michiel Wagemakers. However in every surgery, a whole team of people is involved, and in an awake brain surgery, being a multidisciplinary effort, a special amount of teamwork is required. These are the other people in the OR.

Neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist

Dr Gea Drost is neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist at the UMCG and works at the department of Neurology, as well as the department of Neurosurgery. She has been working at the UMCG for four years now. Since then, her scientific and clinical focus has been on Intraoperative Neurophysiological Monitoring. Together with her colleague Fiete Lange she takes care of this during awake brain surgeries.

She also works as general neurologist and clinical neurophysiologist, lectures at national and international conferences, and is secretary of the International Society of Intraoperative Neurophysiology.

Anesthesiologist

Professor Anthony Absalom has been professor of anesthesiology at the UMCG in 2009. He is one of a small team of anesthesiologists at the UMCG that mostly work in the neurosurgery operating theatres. He has been involved in awake brain surgery since 2006 and is the anesthesiologist caring for the patient during the awake brain surgery shown in this MOOC. In addition to the care during surgery, he and his team are intensively involved in the pre-operative preparation of awake surgery patients.

Besides clinical care, he is also involved in pharmacology and neuroscience related research as well as teaching medical students, and trainee nurses and anesthesiologists. He lectures frequently at national and international conferences, and is a committee/board member of several international academic societies.

Others

On top of that, there are are several other key figures, not introduced personally here, that are very crucial in the set-up, the scrub-nurses.

This bird’s eye view gives you an idea of how the team is arranged around the patient in an awake brain surgery.