Don't Forget the Bubbles

So, you’ve done some research, even managed to slave away in front of a hot keyboard for months and thrash out your PhD, but now what? If you want all of your hard to be actually worthwhile and not sitting on a dusty hard drive somewhere you should try and get published.

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Kelly Foster is a leading research development manager, helping broker multidisciplinary research for PREDICT and QEMRF. Bring a strong paediatric nursing background into the mix she understands the challenges of performing research in this area. But you’ve been inspired by Dr Sarah McNab do some research and want to know how do you get started? With so many questions unanswered (and even some old questions that we thought were answered probably unanswered too) we need new generations of researchers to carry the mantle.

Sarah McNab has gone from junior resident all the way through to Director of General Medicine at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. Along the way she has cemented her place in the paediatric research pantheon with the work that led to her PhD, the PIMS trial.

Sarah was really lucky in that her PhD supervisor, Trevor Duke, literally wrote the book on the subject.

Duke T. How to do a postgraduate research project and write a minor thesis. Archives of disease in childhood. 2018 Sep 1;103(9):820-7.

With an involvement in some aspects of research being an integral part of advanced training, whatever the speciality, it is worth considering how to make it actually worth your while.

Victoria Brazil is a senior staff specialist at the Gold Coast University Hospital. She is a world renowned expert in the role of simulation in medical education.

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Grief is complex and individual. It would be foolish to expect everyone to respond in the same way. Everyone is different. Just like there is no such thing as a normal sense of humour, there is also no such thing as normal grief.

In this challenging talk from the last session of DFTB18 Liz Crowe talks about grief. It’s a subject she has explored in her book The Little Book of Loss & Grief.

Mike Starr is not, despite what he tells you, the bassist for Alice in Chains. He is a general paediatrician and paediatric infectious diseases specialist at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. He also happens to be a consultant in paediatric emergency medicine and plays a key role in the group that creates and collates the RCH clinical guidelines.

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Professor Fiona Newall is Director of Nursing Research at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and has a special interest in anticoagulation in children. If you think that the only patients in a hospital that need anticoagulation are old people then you should watch this talk from DFTB18.

The coagulation cascade that we spent so many sleepless nights learning about (and subsequently forgetting) is fundamentally different in children in terms of developmental haemostasis.

Unlike adults who need anticoagulation, primarily for atrial fibrillation or mechanical valves, children may need them following complex surgeries such as the Fontan procedure or prevention of DVTs with indwelling lines.  Here Fiona takes us through some of the complex interplay between patients, their environment and the medication itself.

This is a story of friendship and families. It’s a story about one little girl, Libby, and the impact she has had on the world. If you have been friends of DFTB for some time you may have heard parts of her story. As healthcare providers it can be hard to know what to do when a friend or family member comes to us for medical advice. And if the diagnosis is life-changing then it is near-impossible.

Following the recent online discussion around the FiSH pilot study and the potential harms of fluid boluses demonstrated in the FEAST trial it would seem apropos to release this talk from DFTB18. We seem to have a knee jerk reaction to give a fluid bolus in septic children but should we?

The FEAST trial was published in 2011 and has had very little impact on what we do in the Western setting. What we think of as a low fluid state – dehydration – is not the same as what our colleagues in Africa would view as sepstic. This is something we will explore at a later date. So if we can’t rely wholly on our history and our physical exam is often equivocal then what other methods are there?

Given that DFTB18 was held in Melbourne it was important to highlight the work of PREDICT (the Paediatric Research In Emergency Department International Collaborative)* This talk, by Franz Babl, centred around the management of bronchiolitis and focussed on the recent PARIS trial.