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News & Events

Earlier this week ten emerging researchers took to the stage to pitch their projects to a room full of excited and engaged philanthropists who share our vision of happy, healthy kids.

The vision of the Perioperative Medicine Team is to make discoveries that will improve children’s perioperative care and lead to global practice change.

News & Events

Valuable support from the Raine Medical Research Foundation’s 2025 grant round will power four new research projects at The Kids Research Institute Australia.

News & Events

Perth respiratory researchers have discovered that giving an immune booster to mothers during pregnancy could increase their newborns’ resistance to severe and life-threatening respiratory viral infections.

News & Events

Researchers from The Kids Research Institute Australia will share in almost $4 million in grants to continue groundbreaking research to tackle childhood cancer, asthma, respiratory viral infections and more.

Research

Although clinical trials are fundamental to advancing evidence-based practice, significant heterogeneity in outcome reporting poses a considerable challenge to the validity of systematic reviews. This inconsistency impedes the ability to compare, synthesise and interpret research findings effectively. In the field of paediatric airway management, this issue is particularly relevant because of the low incidence of critical events and the related high morbidity and mortality. The issue of inadequate and variable outcome reporting in clinical trials has been widely acknowledged, necessitating initiatives to enhance the quality of future research.

Research

Processed electroencephalography (EEG) indices used to guide anesthetic dosing in adults are not validated in young infants. Raw EEG can be processed mathematically, yielding quantitative EEG parameters (qEEG). We hypothesized that machine learning combined with qEEG can accurately classify expired sevoflurane concentrations in young infants. Knowledge from this may contribute to development of future infant-specific EEG algorithms.

Research

Flucloxacillin is prescribed to treat skin infections but its highly bitter taste is poorly tolerated in children. This work describes the application of the D-optimal mixture experimental design to identify the optimal component ratio of flucloxacillin, Eudragit EPO and palmitic acid to prepare flucloxacillin taste-masked microparticles that would be stable to storage and would inhibit flucloxacillin release in the oral cavity while facilitating the total release of the flucloxacillin load in the lower gastrointestinal tract.

Research

Inguinal hernia surgery is one of the most common electively performed surgeries in infants. The common nature of inguinal hernia combined with the high-risk population involving a predominance of preterm infants makes this a particular area of interest for those concerned with their perioperative care. Despite a large volume of literature in the area of infant inguinal hernia surgery, there remains much debate amongst anesthetists, surgeons and neonatologists regarding the optimal perioperative management of these patients.

Research

At two hospitals in Western Australia, we conducted a prospective, open-label, randomised, controlled trial of 240 patients undergoing tonsillectomy to investigate the effect of chewing a confectionery jelly snake on postoperative nausea and vomiting. The results were published in Anaesthesia Critical Care & Pain Medicine. Recruitment for this study was completed uneventfully between July 2018 and August 2019.