P. Stehlik, R. Bourke, D. Henry, C. Brandenburg, C. Noble, C. Whithers, A. Barnett, S. Mickan, P. Glasziou, A. Bannach-Brown, D. Ellwood, D. Pearson, E. Veysey, G. Keijzers, G. Wright, H. Joshi, I. Scott, K. Forrest, M. Morgan and R. Liang, Enhancing Clinician Research: A Mixed Methods Study Examining Australian and New Zealand Specialist Trainees’ Experiences and Research Outputs. 2020.

Hypoxaemia remains the main reason of death in children with pneumonia with the highest health care burden on society world-wide. With increasing hospital and intensive care admissions, respiratory support is now targeted early in the progression of the disease. Recent developments have shown that early intervention with non-invasive and well tolerated respiratory support systems have reduced the need to escalate therapy and offloaded the pressure on high cost ICU beds. This has recently been proven with the COVID-19 pandemic, where nasal high-flow therapy has reduced the need for invasive ventilation and likely mortality in adults. The key objectives of 5 large projects within this program aim to demonstrate that early and less invasive respiratory support system will lead to improved overall outcomes in paediatrics.

Queensland Health’s Artificial Intelligence Hub Datathon winners, 2020: Amy Sweeny, Dr Katya May, Dr Nimai Etheridge… $25,000 in Amazon Web Services credit to pursue a project leading to faster reporting of chest x-rays for ED patients.

Host Gene Expression Signatures to Diagnose Sepsis in Children, following on from the RAPIDS project: “Host Gene Expression Signatures to Diagnose Sepsis in Children”. Our paediatric pillar lead, Dr Shane George, is one of the principal investigators on this study, led by A/Prof Luregn Schlapbach from Children’s Health Queensland and UQ. Prof Keith Grimwood and Dr Peter Snelling are also co-investigators. Specific aims of the project include the creation of a paediatric biobank, identification of gene markers for sepsis, and evaluation of a point of care test that rapidly determines whether a critically ill paediatric patient has an infection (bacterial or viral).

Findings from a Gold Coast Health driven investigation into the use of intravenous fluids in sepsis management in emergency patients will be used as the foundation for a larger, $2.33M randomised controlled trial. 

Sepsis, although not very common, is a serious condition where infection leads to organ dysfunction and possibly death. 

The planned ARISE: Fluids study will explore liberal versus restricted fluid management in patients with septic shock after a large study led by principal investigator Professor Gerben Keijzers showed that there was large variation in how much fluid patients were given.