Paediatric intensive care transport services: DEPICT study (2017 - 2020)
CORU’s embedded work at Great Ormond Street Hospital directly contributed to a new NIHR funded national study, led by GOSH called DEPICT.
Each year, 6000 children require emergency transfer from a local hospital to a PICU, on average 20-30 miles away. These children tend to be the sickest of PICU patients, and are more likely to die or have long lasting complications.
Transports of sick children to PICU are usually done by specialist retrieval teams (PICRTs). PICRTs are mobile intensive care teams, who take specialist expertise to the child and safely transport them to a PICU. Our previous research showed that PICRTs improve the survival of critically ill children. However, how quickly PICRTs are able to reach sick children, and how they are organised and deliver clinical care varies across the UK. We do not know if national variation in how PICRT services are organised and delivered matters, or whether current standards help achieve the best outcomes for patients.
In DEPICT, analysts will investigate what service delivery factors influence how likely a child is to survive and other clinical outcomes. Alongside this, we will also learn from interviews with families and staff what matters most to them about retrieval services. CORU will then take the insights from these quantitative and qualitative phases to build mathematical models to explore the impact of different service delivery configurations on children’s outcomes.