Innovation with Heart
"Innovation with Heart" reflects our commitment to world-class research driven by compassion, purpose and powerful partnerships - advancing healthier futures for every child.
Turning Questions into Change: A Sleep Physician’s Reluctant Leap into Research
Embarking on a PhD career is not for the faint hearted. You need determination, drive and an abundance of commitment. When Associate Professor Jasneek Chawla launched her career at the Queensland Children’s Hospital (previously Mater Children’s) as a sleep and respiratory physician, she was ready to dedicate her career to her patients as a clinician.
Her determination, her drive, and her ability to write, did not go unnoticed by the professors around her at the Children’s Hospital Queensland, who encouraged her to take on a career in research, but Associate Professor Chawla wanted to make a difference as a clinician.
As Associate Professor Chawla’s career progressed, she was getting increasingly frustrated with the limited literature available for sleep treatment for children with disabilities.
“We would make recommendations like surgery for their breathing or CPAP machines for sleep apnoea, and families would report the success of these interventions with relief – but there was no data to back the interventions up,” Associate Professor Chawla said.
“I wanted to know how does it make a difference? What are the outcomes of the intervention on cognition, behaviour and quality of life? When I looked at the literature, I couldn’t find anything that confirmed what we were finding.”
Associate Professor Jasneek Chawla approached her superiors at Queensland Health to see if they could set up a research project to investigate the outcomes of sleep intervention for children with neuro-disabilities, and the supervising team recommended she take on a higher degree with the University of Queensland.
Reluctantly, she agreed.
Before Associate Professor Chawla had even completed her PhD, she had won two grants including a Medical Research Future Fund and built her own research team, investigating the outcomes of sleep intervention for children with neurodisabilities.
Through her research career, Associate Professor Chawla has been able to contribute to families, in an even more meaningful way.
“Families with children with disabilities start to just accept that sleepless nights are just something they have to get used to. When we show families that there are interventions to improve sleep for their children –the families burst into tears, because we are the first ones to take them seriously.”
The University of Queensland’s Child Health Research Centre (CHRC) brings innovation and collaboration to child health research. Our leading researchers work towards a future where every child, young person and family thrive.
For more information about CHRC and the Kids Sleep, visit www.uq.edu.au/first10kdays and follow us on LinkedIn
Media Contact:
Group Leader, Kids Sleep Research
Email: j.chawla@uq.edu.au
An unlikely career that led to novel approaches to help save critically sick children with Artificial Intelligence
The University of Queensland’s Child Health Research Centre’s Professor Kristen Gibbons launched her career as a statistician. Today Professor Gibbons uses her skills as a statistician to lead the CHIRP team to explore how Artificial Intelligence can improve health outcomes for very critically ill children in Australia and New Zealand.
In an Australian first, Professor Gibbons and her team launched the innovative program, PLATNIUM (the Paediatric Platform Adaptive Trial for Intensive Care Management), funded by the Medical Research Future Fund.
Professor Gibbons said the PLATNIUM application will allow research to be conducted on critically ill children, which has previously been very difficult to accomplish.
“Critically ill children are not researched on a large scale due to high clinical loads in Paediatric Intensive Care Units (PICUs) and the ethical challenges of enrolling severely unwell children into clinical trials,” Professor Gibbons said.
“As a result, the sickest children have frequently been excluded from high quality trials and paediatric practice is extrapolated from adult studies that may be misleading or potentially harmful to children.
“This Medical Research Future Fund grant we won this week, will allow us to conduct an inception project that builds the evidence and capability of establishing the PLATNIUM application. This application will be built on robust statistical methods to help research critically ill children and improve health outcomes,” Professor Gibbons said.
The development of the PLATNIUM application will enable simultaneous assessment of prioritised research questions and provide evidence-based interventions in a timely manner to Paediatric Intensive Care Units (PICUs).
To develop this project, The University of Queensland’s Children’s Health Research will be partnering with all Australia and New Zealand PICUs. These partnerships with Australian and New Zealand PICUs will allow unprecedented access to clinicians researchers, children, young people, parents and caregivers.
PLATNIUM will utilise data from the Australian and New Zealand Paediatric Intensive Care Registry (ANZPICR) which captures information on 94 percent of children admitted to a PICU or mixed ICU in Australia and New Zealand since 1997.
These comprehensive data collection approaches allow PLATNIUM to be scalable across Australia and New Zealand. This scalable approach ensures that successful interventions can be swiftly and widely implemented across PICUs in Australia and New Zealand.
The PLATNIUM application will advances the current state of paediatric intensive care research and sets a precedent for future trials.
The University of Queensland’s Child Health Research Centre (CHRC) brings innovation and collaboration to child health research. Our leading researchers work towards a future where every child, young person and family thrive.
For more information about CHRC and the ChIRP, visit www.uq.edu.au/first10kdays and follow us on LinkedIn
Media Contact:
Group Leader, Children’s Intensive Care Research Program (ChIRP)
Email: chirp@uq.edu.au