The PicPod

ECMO: The ultimate end point of Paediatric Intensive Care. We discussed all things ECMO with Chris Harvey, who leads the UK’s only mobile ECMO service. He will cannulate a patient in the referring hospital, and transport back to his ECMO centre in Leicester. What are the survival rates from ECMO? What are the survival rates of patients not accepted, either because they are too sick, or too w...

The PIVOTAL trial is the world’s first PIC specific Platform trial. It comes hot on the heels of some brilliant UK PIC research, like OxyPICU ( PicPod77 ), and GASTRIC (not published yet, but will definitely have a PicPod soon!). It’s a platform which aims to reduce the life cycle of PIC research from about 10 years from idea to publication, down towards one half, or one third. All UK...

We were able to have a short conversation with Dr Mohammed Abed, director of the only functioning PICU in Gaza, at the Al Nasser hospital in Khan Younis. His dignity, pride, and incredible efforts in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe was incredibly humbling. He describes three cohorts of patients: a large amount of trauma, especially shrapnel injuries from bombs, patients admitted, and dying,...

PicPod 88 is all about Pertussis in Paediatric Critical Care. Malignant Pertussis is, for intensivists, one of the most terrible conditions to treat, with a dearth of evidence, and but plenty of evidence of death. For PicPod 88 we have spoken to James Cherry from UCLA. James Cherry is a medical institution. At 94 years old he is still going strong with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Paediatric Infe...

We spoke to Juan Valle Ortiz from Newcastle, Consultant in Paediatric Intensive Care. He is involved in the PaNGEa project ( www. pangeacambridge.co.uk ), and is an ESPNIC ventilation instructor. He’s also a singer ! What is non invasive ventilation? Does it work? What are the thresholds for starting NIV? S/F ratios: are they useful in clinical practice? How do we know that NIV has been effe...

Major traumatic brain injury is a huge issue for Paediatric Intensive Care. We have machines for almost every organ: but the brain is on its own. Shruti Agrawal, consultant in paediatric intensive care in Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge, is first author on the Starship study, recently published in the Lancet eClinical medicine . We discussed this study with her. 135 children with severe traumatic...

“Saving lives” is what we do. But at what cost? Are we threatening the survival of the world by our PIC practices? What’s the point of healthcare, if we are destroying the world’s future for those same children? We talked to Heather Baid, an ICU nurse and lead for sustainability special interest group at the University of Brighton and Imogen Stringer, Head of Sustainability...

Nudge nudge…. a favourite of politicians and social commentators, but how can nudge technology help us in ventilation weaning? Lisa McIlmurray has been working on a pilot study of nudge technology attached to a ventilator. How does this help to move patients on? What are the algorithms used in this technology? Are there unintended consequences? What is the user acceptability? How was the too...

Change is hard….isn’t it? We spoke to Rebecca Lawton, a professor of Psychology from the University of Leeds, who is an expert in patient safety; behaviour change; improvement science; workforce engagement and wellbeing. Why is change so difficult? Who is it most difficult for? And how do we convince individuals, and teams, to make changes? How do hierarchies interact with team changes? The psycho...

First, do no harm… How much of the things we do every day are worthwhile? We all do so many interventions, but are they actually worthwhile? Some may be ineffective, some inefficient, and some may be harmful. But which is which? How do we find out whether we should, or shouldn’t do something? What is an acceptable miss rate? What are the implications of getting this trending towards ze...