[children's transport group] Re: PICS conference report

Hello everyone

 

I thought I'd just mention a few things I caught at the Paediatric Intensive Care Society conference that might be of interest to others. If anyone else was there, feel free to chip in!

 

Dr Steve Marriage (Bristol) has developed a portable ambulance that can fold away into a box! It is only a shell of the rear compartment, but looks fantastic for scenario practise for services that don't have dedicated ambulances. It has piped gas and power, both of which can be caused to fail for added realism. It looks like a very neat tool.

 

Mark Clement (CATS, London) offered up a poster which described qualitative research documenting interviews with retrieval staff. I found his conversations about team dynamics and doctor/nurse interactions fascinating.

 

Dr Dave Rowney (Edinburgh) presented a paper looking at the need for a national paediatric air ambulance in the UK. He said that in order to get the safest and most appropriate service, before looking at provision options we needed to focus on getting the standards ready for the sort of service we required.

There was a poster by Dr Kathryn Davison (Leeds) which looked at extubating patients with seizures in the local hospital. She demonstrated that retrieval of these patients can often be safely avoided. I think I knew this, but it was nice to see data!

 

Dr Amber Young looked at the issues of fluid management in burns patients. She described the morbidity associated with excessive fluid intake which is often due to initial overestimation of burn surface area (BSA). I've had the replacement fluid calculation of 3-4mL x kg x burn percentage drilled into me for ages but her service only start fluid replacement at 15% burns, replace only 2mL x kg x BSA, and aim for urine outputs of 0.5mL/kg/hr. I need to do more reading!

 

Regards,

 

Ian Braithwaite

Senior Transport Nurse

Yorkshire and Humber Infant and Children's Transport Service (Embrace)

+ 44 (0)114 305 3005