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3rd Jun 2015

Mark Peters talks Fortunes' Fool

Join Professor Mark Peters on the 9 June at the Institute of Child Health in London as he talks "Fortune's Fool".

Mark, who was the Expedition Leader for the Xtreme Everest YES (Young Everest Study) on the 2013 expedition, will be speaking about the chance, luck and sometimes randomness that occurs within paediatric intensive care and research into this subject.

To book onto the event, please visit the ICH Event Brite page

The abstract for Prof Peters' talk can be found below:

Abstract

Paediatric Intensive Care Units are crucial to child health. Our best estimate is that without them the childhood mortality rate in the UK would double. Outcomes for paediatric critical illness continue to improve dramatically, while demand for our services grows at around 5% a year. Extraordinarily, this has been achieved without a formal research base. UCL appointing a first UK research-based Chair in Paediatric Intensive Care Medicine is therefore hugely significant for our speciality.

Shakespeare repeatedly uses the phrase ‘Fortune’s Fool ‘as shorthand for chance, luck, randomness or the effects of variability. My appointment here results from a series of random events and no small amount of extraordinary luck. It could, and probably should, have been an honour for one of my many mentors. Perhaps I should not be surprised; after all Intensivists live in an environment surround by apparent randomness and variability and chance.

Variability and our response to it fascinating. Children respond to a similar life-threatening insults in dramatically varying ways. Our treatments normalise some abnormal physiological parameters while tolerating others. We have little or no evidence for these decisions. My research seeks to characterise patients by their responses, to generate empirical data from clinical trials of basic interventions, and also to understand and work around some of our biases in our responses. I suspect that we need a new, more welcoming attitude to physiological variability and share the concept of ‘antifragility’.

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