Biography

Wilton van Klei received his PhD in 2002 and completed his postgraduate training as anesthesiologist in the Netherlands (2006. After that he did a clinical and research fellowship in perioperative medicine (Ottawa, Ontario, 2007). He returned to the Netherlands to complete a fellowship in cardiothoracic anesthesia (2009), including training in TEE. From 2007 till 2012, he was the Medical Director of the Outpatient Preoperative Evaluation Clinic of the UMC Utrecht. Subsequently, he was the Chair of the Department of Anesthesiology and the Director Research and Education of the Division of Anesthesiology, Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine of the UMC Utrecht (2013-2021). Curently, his primary affiliation is at the University Health Network Toronto / University of Toronto, but he holds a small appointment as a research professor at the UMC Utrecht.

His interests focus on improving care for high-risk surgical patients, and involve collaborations with cardiologists, surgeons, clinical chemists, and epidemiologists within the UMC Utrecht’s Circulatory Health research programme. He is supervising several PhD students on clinical research projects in the field of cardiovascular perioperative medicine. Most projects aim to unravel further the etiology, detection and treatment of asymptomatic myocardial injury after surgery. He considers hisself a specialist in perioperative medicine.
Perioperative medicine starts before surgery with a preanesthesia assessment and currently often ends with the patient leaving the recovery room, except for a responsibility for postoperative pain management. However, anesthesiologists should be involved not only in pain management, but also in providing postoperative care on general wards, monitoring vital functions and monitoring for complications likely to be related to surgery and anesthesia. In fact, anesthesiologists should extend what they are doing in the operating room to the surgical floor in order to improve patient outcomes. He is working towards this goal by initiating research in those areas where evidence for optimal treatment is absent.