Riphagen, Shelley

Biography

Dr Shelley Riphagen is a consultant in children's intensive care, specialising in retrieval medicine.

Shelley left South Africa, where she qualified as a paediatrician, in 1996. She then spent three and a half years in Toronto, Canada, where she specialised in intensive care in children and newborn babies, including retrieval. 

In 2000, she started working as a clinical fellow in the paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at Evelina London, and became a consultant in 2002.

Shelley's main focus over the past 10 years has been the South Thames Retrieval Service (STRS), a children's acute transport service which specialises in the inter-hospital transfer of critically ill children in London (south of the River Thames).

Shelley's other main focus is on the development of the retrieval nurse practitioner programme. This programme is the first in the UK and Europe and supports outstanding service provision by STRS to our region’s children and their families.

In 2010, Shelley and Dr Andrew Durward launched a children's emergency drug calculator app to streamline care for critically ill children.

Shelley's current area of interest is to develop a co-ordinated national inter-hospital air retrieval service for children, with helipad access to all PICUs in the UK.