Intensive Care & Hyperbaric Medicine research

Research areas within The Alfred Department of Intensive Care and Hyperbaric Medicine include:

• traumatic brain injury (TBI)
• trauma, sepsis
• resuscitation
• acute lung injury
• transfusion
• sedation
• nutrition
• renal failure
• extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO)
• Intensive Care Unit (ICU) outcomes

The department benefits from the Alfred Research Alliance co-location and linkage with the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre (ANZIC-RC) within the Monash School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine (SPHPM) and with the Monash Central Clinical School through the Monash Partners Academic Health Science Centre. All Alfred ICU consultants hold academic appointments with SPHPM.

In 2014, our research active group consisted of 16 consultants with one NHMRC Practitioner Fellow (Professor Jamie Cooper), two Alfred-Monash Practitioner Fellows (Associate Professor David Pilcher and Dr Andrew Udy). Dr Chris Nickson joined us as the Monash SPHPM Alfred ICU Education Practitioner Fellow. We had four Professors (Stephen Bernard, Jamie Cooper, Carlos Scheinkestel and David Tuxen) and two Associate Professors (Warwick Butt and David Pilcher).

The department’s publications in high impact journals for 2014 included:

• Two in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine by our ECMO team -these publications included a position paper from a group of international experts on the use of ECMO and a paper describing the development and validation of a score to predict survival factors for patients receiving ECMO for respiratory failure
• Two in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) - these publications included an ANZIC Clinical Trials Group (CTG) study on the cost-effectiveness of dalteparin versus unfractionated heparin for the prevention of thromboembolism and a study examining patterns of mortality related to severe sepsis and septic shock in ICU patients in Australia and New Zealand over a 12-year period
• One in New England Journal of Medicine (N Engl J Med) - which reported on an ANZIC CTG study, known as ARISE, which showed that early goal directed therapy did not significantly change survival rates in ICU patients in Australia and New Zealand compared with usual care

Dr Andrew Udy authored 11 publications, including one looking at renal function in ICU patients in the context of a multicentre observational study (Udy A et al., Crit Care Med 2014).

Associate Professor David Pilcher led the productive interrogation of the unique bi-national ICU registry resulting in the paper ‘Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome Criteria in Defining Severe Sepsis’ (Kaukonen KM et al., New Engl J Med 2015).

The total of funding to Alfred ICU department investigators for grants active in 2014 was more than $31 million (for the duration of the grants), with $20 million being from the NHMRC.