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The University of Oxford Critical Care Research Group had a good number of abstracts accepted for the Intensive Care Society State of the Art 2017. Verity Westgate, our Research Co-ordinator, provides a summary.

I was delighted to be able to attend the Intensive Care Society State of the Art conference again in 2017. This year the conference was held in Liverpool, a city that I had not visited before. This was the first time that the conference had been held outside of London. The location, ACC Liverpool, is at the centre of the Albert Docks which meant that we could all stay within walking distance of the conference. There were also lots of local attractions nearby, but with such a busy conference we didn't have the time to investigate! Maybe we should have arrived earlier in the weekend to take advantage of everything that was on offer.

The Kadoorie Centre had strong representation at the conference.  Mirae Harford (@MiraeHarford), Academic Clinical Fellow, opened up proceedings with the very first breakfast-time soapbox presentation of the conference talking about video based physiological monitoring; she spoke about the techniques that she has been working on with the group including the use of thermo-imaging to measure vital signs.

Julie Darbyshire’s (@JLDarbyshire) presentation was part of the “Lights, Sounds, Action” session on Tuesday.  She talked about the SILENCE project and the work that is being done in the ICU at Oxford to make staff more aware of, and address, sources of noise. 

Several posters were taken to the conference.  Jody Ede, Research Nurse, presented a poster about a human factors analysis that she had carried out identifying barriers and facilitators to information exchange about the escalation of care in a deteriorating patient.  Jon Bedford’s poster (@JonBedford) described the Hocus Pocus software that he has helped to develop which facilitates ultrasound accreditation for trainees in intensive care.  Hocus Pocus was demonstrated at a later stage in the conference.  James Malycha (@JMalycha) showed a poster about an audit he had undertaken which involved real-time tracking around the hospital of adult ICU registrars at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, evaluating how much time was spent on the ICU and how much time elsewhere.

In my blog post about last year’s event, I noted my own ambition to present a poster at the conference and I was pleased to achieve this.  My poster was entitled: “Decision making in the context of ‘big data’: Using the Delphi process to spot the needle in the haystack” describing the use of a Delphi process to identify variables for inclusion in a score to predict patients at risk of deterioration in the HAVEN project.

Making connections is a key part of any conference but can be difficult if you have not been working in the sector for long.  Like last year, I enjoyed interacting with other attendees through the Kadoorie Centre (@Kadoorie Centre) twitter account (to search for tweets from the conference use #icssoa2017).  I also took part in the early run on Tuesday morning (#icsrunning) where forty delegates ran three miles around the docklands; it was great to interact with people in a more informal way.  The conference also provided the opportunity for the Kadoorie team to spend time together with a group meal; it is rare for so many of us to be in the same place at the same time!

Many of the presentations delivered at this year’s SOA are available as free podcasts

The conference will be held in London next year, 10th-12th December, and we hope to be back with more posters and presentations.  See you there?

 

Useful links:
Intensive Care Society

Verity Westgate, Research Co-ordinator

@KadoorieCentre twitterfeed