Calum Semple is a respiratory and infectious disease professor in Liverpool. He has been part of the governmental advice team for pandemics since before COVID. We spoke to him in advance of his talk at the 2024 PCCS conference What is the frequency of pandemics? Is the 1918 Spanish Flu Read more
Nicola Disma, an anaesthetist in Genoa, Italy, is lead author on the European Society of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care guidelines on airway management in neonates and infants, published in full text here. We discussed all things airway. Video laryngoscopes: useful, mandatory, or deskilling? “Normal” video blade or hyperangulated? Oxygen during Read more
What’s the point of evidence? It’s to gain knowledge, so that we can treat our patients better. But what happens when the data is wrong, faked, misleading, or simply made up? Retraction Watch (www.retractionwatch.com, and @retractionwatch) collates retractions from journals around the world. Their database makes terrifying reading: tens of Read more
From the 2023 PediCritiCon conference in Pune, India, I was lucky enough to chat with Bala Ramachandran from Chennai. He gave a great talk on precision medicine, its implications, and what the future may hold. What’s the difference between personalised medicine and precision medicine? How does it differ to “usual” Read more
Much research is technical and esoteric. Some research is fundamental and answers questions we want to answer every day. Often the first is easy to do (just add a lab and equipment), but the second is really, really hard. Mark Peters and team have just published the OxyPICU trial in Read more
PicPod went to the 2023 PediCritiCon conference in Pune, India. It was a superb conference full of content, learning, and Bollywood dancing…! We sat down with Brenda Morrow, Professor of Paediatrics at the Red Cross Hospital in Cape Town, physiotherapist, and president of the World Federation of Paediatric Intensive and Read more
At the PCCS2023 conference Harish and I were delighted to be invited to be a part of the conference. We were interviewed on stage by Zoltan Gyorgyi and Peter Donnelly, who asked us about the birth of PicPod, the process, and some highlights and lowlights. Unfortunately questions from the audience Read more
At the PCCS2023 conference in Edinburgh, we were lucky enough to meet David Cooper from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He gave a great talk on high reliability teams, and afterwards we chatted to him about his programme. We discuss hierarchies: when are hierarchies good, and when are they bad? Is democracy Read more
One of the most entertaining talks at the 2023 Paediatric Critical Care Society Conference was by Roddy O’Kane, consultant neurosurgeon in Glasgow, on the management of ICP. On the theme of the conference, he was very clear: proper management of ICP depends on excellent team work, and listening to all Read more
At the 2023 PCCS conference in Edinburgh we chatted to Marie Spiers, Emergency Department consultant in Glasgow, about paediatric traumatic cardiac arrest. How does traumatic cardiac arrest differ to medical cardiac arrest? Is the treatment different? What should we be focusing on? What is the point in chest compressions, and Read more