ICU Management & Practice, ICU Volume 6 - Issue 1 - Spring 2006

Research: SCCM Awards

The 35th Critical Care Congress of the Society of Critical Care Medicine was held in San Francisco 7th to 11th January 2006. A selection of the SCCM awards is reported here and a full list is available on the SCCM website: www.sccm.org/ membership/awards/recipients/index.asp

 

The winner of the 2006 SCCM Vision Grant, sponsored through contributions to the SCCM’s Critical Care Education and Research Foundation, was Nasia Safdar (Clinical Instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School) for her research, “Enhancing patient safety by preventing nosocomial infections: a randomized controlled trial of preemptive precautions for prevention of infection by multi resistant pathogens”. The 2006 Norma J. Shoemaker Critical Care Nursing Research Grant, sponsored by KCI USA Inc., was awarded to Sandra K. Hanneman. Dr Hanneman is Professor of nursing research, Associate Dean for research and Director, Centre for Nursing Research, University of Texas Houston. She won the award for her research “Multi-site randomized clinical trial of horizontal positioning to prevent and treat pulmonary complications in mechanically ventilated critically ill patients; a pilot study.”

 

Sandra Swoboda (John Hopkins, Baltimore) won an educational scholarship for her research “Does isolation status impact the frequency of adverse events in a surgical intermediate care unit”. From this prospective observational study of all patients admitted to a surgical intermediate care unit with a length of stay over 2 days, Dr Swoboda and her colleagues concluded that adverse events reported underestimated actual events for the isolated and non-isolated patient groups, and that isolated patients were more likely to experience an adverse event compared with the non-isolated patient group.

 

In addition to the ten educational scholarships, 10 specialty awards were also presented. These included the Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacology Award, which was won by Lorianne Wright, (Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital Nashville), for her research “Impact of patient-specific decision support on medication errors in critically ill children”. The Healthcare Industry Award was won by James Shaffer (Health First, Inc.) for “Remote ICU Management improves outcomes in patients with cardiopulmonary arrest.” Coresearchers on this project included Mike Breslow from VISICU Baltimore (see Dr Breslow’s article on page 58 in this issue of ICU Management). The Paediatrics Award was presented to Kshitij Mistry (Paediatric Critical Care Medicine, University of North Carolina), for “Communication error during post-operative patient hand off in the paediatric intensive care unit.” This research study defined miscommunication as absence or inaccuracy in 18 categories of information necessary to provide adequate post-operative care. Recordings of the verbal sign-out process and medical records were used to evaluate 134 admissions. The researchers concluded from their results that miscommunications commonly occurred during post operative patient hand over and that most involved multiple events. See also the article, “Teamwork for Safety” on page 12 in this issue of ICUManagement.

 

Two nursing section research awards were also presented, and there were five research citation winners, including one for “Blood Volume measurements: Impact on fluid management”. Elisabeth Biuk-Aghai and colleagues from the Surgical Critical Care Unit at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, hypothesised that blood volume measurement may alter treatment decisions regarding fluid and blood product management. Following a prospective observational study of blood volume measurements followed by a retrospective chart review of 42 surgical intensive care unit patients, the researchers concluded that traditional means to evaluate the fluid status of critically ill patients may not be accurate. Blood volume measurements resulted in treatment changes in 40% of the cases in this study.

 

Full abstracts from the Congress are published in the “Society of Critical Care Medicine’s 35th Critical Care Congress Abstracts” Supplement to Critical Care Medicine Volume 33 Number 12 December 2005.

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