Bookings close on: Thursday 14 May 2026

Date: Friday, 15 May 2026
Time: 6.30 pm
Location: Apothecaries’ Hall
Who can attend: Open to all
Lecture and Drink: Members £15
Dress code:  Casual
Contact: AcademicEvents@apothecaries.org

Presenting Oceans and Battlefields: Trauma Care in Tomorrow’s War (The Leslie Payne Memorial Lecture)
To be given by Col Paul Parker & Surgeon Cdr Jowan Penn Barwell

Col Parker will outline the tenets of ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ as the basis of trauma care on tomorrows contested battlefield. He will outline how drones have completely altered the face of trauma care on the battlefield. He will cover the need for at-risk upskilling of non-physician medics to debride, stabilise, fasciotomise and pack the abdomen or pelvis at reach aided by a paired non-physician provider delivering single-syringe anaesthesia.

Colonel Paul Parker is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon. He is the British Army’s most senior Consultant Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgeon, and has a busy NHS practice at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, the UK’s largest level 1 trauma centre. With over 15 operational tours: He has deployed to; Northern Ireland. Bosnia, Kosovo. Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, Djibouti, Syria and North West Pakistan. He is a Senior Lecturer in Special Operations Medicine at University College Cork and has authored over 90 highly relevant papers on trauma resuscitation, drones, abdominal/junctional tourniquets and surgery in austere and remote locations.

The Faculty of Conflict & Catastrophe Medicine owes its existence to Dr Leslie Payne who died in 2018.

He helped establish the Diploma in the Medical Care of Catastrophes (DMCC), which continues to be taught and examined at the Society of Apothecaries. From the early 1970s, Leslie laboured long and hard as the Ballistic and Blast Archivist to the Department of Military Surgery at RAMC College Millbank. This unpaid work was carried out in addition to managing his busy dental practice. At the same time, he was discretely advising security agencies in the UK. His areas of particular interest and expertise included blast biophysics and pathophysiology, and penetrating civilian and military ballistic injury.

Leslie was also a noted expert on stab injury and unarmed combat and worked closely with the London Metropolitan Police and the Association of Chief Police Officers of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland in these areas.