Surveys

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.

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. 

There is currently limited information available about the different ventilation and patient management strategies adopted by each hospital which has left a lack of implementation of a uniform therapeutic strategy by authoritative intensive care bodies.

Through this survey, we aim to gain more information about different strategies used across the UK and all intensive care units in the UK will be approached to participate in this survey.

The following questions will be allocated in sections, based upon clinician experiences of management for an all-adult population (18 and over) who are mechanically ventilated. 

We hope that this will provide important insight to all critical care physicians about areas of management that the intensive community has now settled and agreed on, and where variation in practice still exists across the UK.

This information will feed into discussion and guideline generation to further improve outcomes for mechanically ventilated patients.

The study investigators are Ahilanandan Dushianthan, Sandra Lima, Florence Neyroud, Rebecca Cusack and Mike Grocott.

Please contact Ahilanadan Dushianthan at a.dushianthan@soton.ac.uk for more information.

To help improve our understanding of clinical decision-making on when to intubate in hypoxemic respiratory failure in adults, we invite all clinicians involved in this decision to complete a 10-minute anonymous online survey. This includes nurses, physicians, respiratory therapists, and potentially others.

The survey has been approved by the research ethics board of the Scarborough Health Network in Toronto, Canada and is available in a variety of languages as we are gathering responses from an international population of clinicians.

Please direct any questions or concerns to the principal investigator, Christopher Yarnell at cyarnell@shn.ca or christopher.yarnell@uhn.ca and distribute to any interested colleagues.

A UCL study is looking for volunteers to join one to two online workshops in November 2023 and complete one questionnaire.  

The number of patients taking part in rehabilitation in critical care remains low and the researchers want to hear about rehabilitation experiences to better support patients and healthcare professionals.

They would like to speak to relatives/carers or patients who has been admitted to critical care in the UK in the last 3 years OR are working as a critical care healthcare professional.

 All volunteers must be aged over 18. 

Workshop 1 - Tuesday 7 November (10am- 1:30pm)

Workshop 2 - Thursday 30 November (1- 4pm)

You do not need to attend both workshops, the second workshop is an optional follow-up to the first and can be decided at a later date. 

To thank you for your time, they will be offering reimbursement.  £75 will be provided for participation in workshop one and completing the questionnaire and another £75 for participation in workshop two.

If interested, please contact Catherine Lawrence, the study lead.

Management of ventilation survey

This survey is conducted by researchers at Imperial College London and aims to assess the use of clinical decision support systems for the management of ventilation in intensive care.

This survey is open to all clinicians working in intensive care, who routinely interact with the ventilator. Your answers will be anonymised and may be published in relevant journals. The data will be stored for a maximum of 6 months in a password-protected database, and will only be accessed by the study coordinator. Please do not complete the survey if you are not happy with this.

Sepsis Priority Setting Partnership

In 2023/24 Sepsis Research FEAT is proud to be undertaking the first ever Sepsis Priority Setting Partnership (Sepsis PSP), in conjunction with the James Lind Alliance (JLA).

This is an invaluable opportunity for sepsis patients, their carers, clinicians and researchers to come together to shape the future of sepsis research in the UK and more widely for the next ten years and beyond. Of benefit to the entire sepsis community, the ultimate goal is to understand the mechanisms of sepsis better and to improve diagnosis, treatment and patient outcomes.

While the James Lind Alliance (JLA) facilitates such partnerships, the initiative will be driven by Sepsis Research FEAT, which will fund the Sepsis PSP over its 12-18 month lifespan. 

Dr Joanne McPeake, and two of our Directors of Research, Dr Bronwen Connelly and Dr Nazir Lone will be Clinical Co-Leads.

The online survey will open in September.

ROTATION

Reversal of anticoagulation in the Intensive Care Unit: An international online survey – the ROTATION survey

The aim of the survey is to collect baseline measurements of international policies and practices of anticoagulation reversal used in the Intensive Care Unit, including different types of anticoagulants, thresholds per diagnostic tests, choices of types anticoagulation reversal drugs and blood products. We hypothesized that in this patient population a large heterogeneity exists between and within different subpopulations.

This research could be helpful to monitor and guide future changes in anticoagulation reversal practices in the ICU (i.e. response to new international guidelines) or to identify knowledge gaps.

The steering committee includes: Prof. dr. Alexander Vlaar, Prof. dr. Nicole Juffermans, Dr. Marcella Müller, Drs. Maite van Haeren, Drs. Stefan van Wonderen.