Zoom On: Pedro Póvoa, Polyvalent ICU, Hospital de São Francisco Xavier, Lisbon

Professor Pedro Póvoa, MD, PhD is Associate Professor of Medicine at the Nova Medical School, New University of Lisbon in Portugal, and Coordinator of the Polyvalent Intensive Care Unit, Hospital de São Francisco Xavier, CHLO in Lisbon. Prof. Póvoa is Associate Editor of Revista Brasileira de Terapia Intensiva, and is a member of the editorial board of PLoS ONE and Hospital Practice and a reviewer for 27 medical journals. He is an active member of the Portuguese Society of Internal Medicine, Portuguese Society of Intensive Care, Associação de Medicina Intensiva Brasileira and the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine.

1. What are your key areas of interest and research?
My main current areas of interest and research is sepsis; and in sepsis my research focus is on ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP)/ ventilator-associated tracheobronchitis (VAT) and biomarkers.

2. What are the major challenges in your field?
In an era of growing antibiotic resistance my main challenge is to develop strategies to improve our ability to diagnose infection, namely VAP and VAT, and to assess the response to antibiotic therapy.

3. What is your top management tip?
My common recommendation is to have very good management of  time.

4. What would you single out as a career highlight?
Probably the fact of having demonstrated, more than 10 years ago, that the daily measurements of biomarkers are much more informative than a single measurement -  this concept is still working.

5. If you had not chosen this career path you would have become a…?
This is a difficult question, since I would not know if I would be happy as I am as an intensivist; but as a profession probably an architect, and for an alternative way of living a sailor.

6. What are your personal interests outside of work?
Till a couple of years ago I sailed; the last boat was a Prindle 19; besides this I do photography.

7. Your favourite quote?
Never never give up.

Further reading
Póvoa P, Salluh J, Nobre V, Martin-Loeches I (2016) Biomarker guided antibiotic therapy: what's new? ICU Management & Practice, 16(1): 24-8.