The PA Hospital (PAH) campus is set to add a new research hub to improve outcomes for patients with heart and lung related health problems.
Based in the newly established Division of Heart and Lung and Critical Care at the PAH, the PA Heart and Lung Research Centre will foster and develop novel research with the aim of saving more lives and getting patients home sooner to their families.
PAH Cardiologist Associate Professor Anthony Camuglia said the centre will serve to not only progress research projects but build upon research already undertaken in the heart and lung space by PA campus staff.
With the PAH being one of the busiest cardiac units in all of Australasia, Anthony is hopeful the new centre will highlight the impact the PA is having in saving and changing lives of cardiac and lung patients for the better.
“We've got a research unit already just called the Cardiology Research Unit. We have dedicated research nurses and we participate in a number of mainly industry supported research trials,” he said.
“That’s both pharmaceutical as well as device industry supported research so heart valves, stents, pacemakers, and that sort of thing. We want to try and elevate the profile of the work being done so that we can help more patients.
“There's a couple of good reasons to do that, one being there are young cardiologists coming through who are enthusiastic about research and we want to be able to better facilitate that for them.
“We’re all clinicians who try and do a bit of research on the side to help our patients, but what we’d like to do is get some serious researchers in place who do a bit of clinical work on the side.
“We’d also like to be able look for other avenues of funding research and employ a research fellow as well as freeing up our research nurse from other tasks to do more actual research.”
A/Prof Camuglia said the unit’s focus is not only on saving lives but in engaging in world leading research so that they can create better health outcomes for all.
“Currently we have a number of exciting heart valve trials and we’ll be the first hospital in Queensland for one of these studies and one of only two or three in Australia to do the new keyhole valve replacement,” he said.
“It’s a true area of need as it’s a condition for which the standard treatment is open heart surgery, but most patients if they’ve got a condition called tricuspid regurgitation, they will not tolerate open heart surgery.”
“It's a condition for which the surgery is very risky, and if people just don't get treated they eventually have liver failure from it.
“This valve is primarily research, but it is also a permanent treatment for them as in they get the valve.
A/Prof Camuglia said by collaborating with the PA Research Foundation to establish the centre, they now have a place where grateful patients and their families, and people interested in cardiac and lung research can choose to give back.
“If we can get some more donations, then it's going to widen the impact we can have and the number of patients we can help,” he said.
“I also want to get one of these young cardiologists in and driving the research side of it, someone like Dr Matthew Burrage, he's done a PhD at the University of Oxford and is a genuine researcher and clinician who is planning to bring his current Queensland Health and National Heart Foundation research fellowships and collaborations under the umbrella of the PA Heart and Lung Research Centre. Our current setup isn't arranged for someone like him but hopefully we can change that.”
