Stefan Kutzsche


Stefan Kutzsche is a Norwegian paediatrician, neonatologist, anaesthesiologist, and historian of medicine. His research has focused on neonatal brain injury physiology and critical-care physiology, alongside work in medical ethics, medical education, and the history of child healthcare.

Background and career

He graduated as a medical doctor at the University of Hamburg in 1983 and obtained a PhD degree in neonatology from the University of Oslo in 2002. He is double board certified in paediatrics and anaesthesiology.
He has particularly worked with the treatment of children with acute severe illness or injury. He was a senior consultant in pediatric anesthesia, Pediatric [intensive care unit|pediatric intensive care], and neonatal intensive care at Oslo [University Hospital, Ullevål] between 1994 and 2014, heading the Pediatric Intensive Care department for a period. He also worked at the University of Tromsø and the University of Oslo. He served for twelve years with No. 330 Squadron of the Royal [Norwegian Air Force] in Banak on search and rescue and air ambulance missions in northernmost Norway and the waters of the High North, and was later chief physician at the Norwegian [Air Ambulance Foundation]. He spent four years in Kuala Lumpur as an associate professor at the International Medical University and director of the IMU Centre for Education. He has also taken part in medical humanitarian work in Cambodia and Laos, including at the Angkor Hospital for Children. In 2019 he became a special advisor for education at Oslo University Hospital.
He has been a member and chairman of the Board for Licensing Matters and Foreign Medical Practitioners in Norway, a board member of the Norwegian Society of Pediatricians and editor of its journal Paidos, a member of the Norwegian specialty committee for pediatrics, and a member of the clinical ethics committee at Oslo University Hospital. He is an advisory member of the IMU Centre for Bioethics and Humanities, and is a board member of two charitable funds of the Oslo Women's Public Health Association. He is a member of the editorial committee of Acta Paediatrica.

Research

His biomedical research has centred on neonatal brain injury physiology and critical-care physiology, while he has also published in medical ethics, medical education, and the history of child healthcare. Within neonatology and neuroscience, his research focus concerned how oxygen-related processes influence secondary brain injury|secondary] brain injury in newborn infants following perinatal asphyxia. Working with his doctoral advisor Ola Didrik Saugstad, he studied how the oxygen concentration used during emergency resuscitation might affect neurological injury and recovery, a question of major clinical importance and one of the most technically and ethically challenging areas in modern neonatal care because treatment must be given within minutes and may influence both survival and long-term neurological outcome. He and other members of Saugstad's research group helped question the long-standing routine use of 100% oxygen during newborn resuscitation, and he contributed to the early experimental and physiological research in the 1990s that helped lay the groundwork for the amendment of international resuscitation guidelines in 2010. He has also published experimental studies on systemic inflammation and critical-care physiology, including work on endotoxemia and organ responses in large-animal models. He has published over 35 papers in medical journals, including in Pediatrics, Pediatric Research, Biology of the Neonate, Critical Care Medicine, Pediatric [Critical Care Medicine], Thrombosis Research, Acta Paediatrica, and Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica.