We're glad to be able to support research in intensive care at all levels and often make research opportunities available to our members.
You can find open opportunites to participate below, or can get in touch with our Research team to let us know about yours.
Open surveys
Animal assisted intervention services across UK intensive care units: National service evaluation
Researchers - Bronwen Connolly, Sam Wright, Kate Tantam, Megan Hosey and Holly McAree are undertaking a national service evaluation of animal assisted intervention (AAI) services across UK ICUs,
AAI services may be animal assisted activity - where a volunteer handler brings a trained animal to the patient for general interaction (e.g. ‘meet and greet’ style episodes) – or animal assisted therapy - involving use of a trained animal by healthcare professionals to address individualised patient requirements in a therapeutic context.
There is currently no data on how many UK ICUs offer AAI services, what these services comprise and what local oversight is in place. Establishing current service levels would underpin future research and guide development of future practice.
The study wants to determine how many ICUs in the UK offer AAI services, characterise available services including e.g. type, format, extent, personnel involved and finally explore and review what local oversight is in place at UK ICUs for available services.
They would greatly value a response from your ICU, irrespective of whether you have AAI services or not as it will help characterise existing service provision. If you think another colleague would be better placed to respond, please forward this email on as they only require 1 response per ICU. They are also asking colleagues to share any local policy or guidance documents with us around AAI services in their ICU.
The survey is estimated to take around 10-15 minutes and will initially be open for a 6-week period.
For more information, or if you have any questions or queries regarding this service evaluation project, please contact Bronwen Connolly at b.connolly@qub.ac.uk.
You can find out more information on the study below and take part below
Survey on Environmental Sustainability Practices in Critical Care
Elie Azoulau, ESICM President and Jan de Waele, ESICM President-elect are looking for your views on sustainable critical care in your setting and the results will inform further phases of the ESICM: Environmental Sustainability in ICU.
Clinical trial focusing on the use of magnesium to prevent AFACS
The Tight K trial is currently open - a multi-centre, randomised controlled trial to determine whether maintaining serum potassium levels at ≥ 3.6 mEq/L is non-inferior to normal treatment (≥ 4.5 mEq/L) on the occurrence of new-onset atrial fibrillation after cardiac surgery (AFACS) in patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft surgery.
The study has recruited 1684 participants and will complete recruitment this month.
We are now looking to develop a follow-on clinical trial focussing on the use of magnesium to prevent AFACS.
To inform the protocol for the Magnesium trial, we want to understand how magnesium is used to prevent AFACS in current practice across the UK and we have developed two online survey to capture this information; a centre-level survey and an individual caregiver survey.