Judith Waterhouse

Judith Waterhouse is a Research Respiratory Physiologist, based in the Respiratory Function Unit at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital.

She is the oldest inhabitant of the university department (since 1968).  She worked as a technician on the MRC oxygen studies of the early seventies and looked after the oxygen concentrator patients in their own homes until the concentrator became a prescription item in 1985.  This involved everything from piping the system, servicing the concentrators regularly and supervising the patients by regular arterial blood samples.

The university department gradually took on a service role to the NHS and Judith ran this from the early 1980s, combining it with research interests particularly in  COPD and oxygen when these were unfashionable subjects.  There were projects together with ScHARR and many European collaborations.

In 2002 she returned to a research role and set up and co-ordinates the CoHoRT study, which compares short and long term outcomes of Pulmonary Rehabilitation dependent on setting (hospital or community).  The short term outcomes are already informing policy at a time when it is politically desirable to put services closer to their users.  She has also worked in the community studying people who felt themselves damaged by a local landfill site, and is currently initiating a community based study regarding respiratory problems and working history.

Judith has presented nationally, and has presented at every European Respiratory Society annual meeting since its inception (plus several meetings of the SEPCR, a precursor of the ERS).  She reviews abstracts for the annual meeting of the Association for Respiratory Technology and Physiology (ARTP) and collaborates with the Centre for Workplace Health.