The Canadian Critical Care Trials Group

The Canadian Critical Care Trials Group: We are a group of Canadian health care professionals from coast to coast who care for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU). Over the past 25 years, we have performed high quality research to enhance the care of critically ill patients and their families. For example, we have asked whether it is safe to transfuse less blood to critically ill adults and children? Yes! We showed that patients had the same chance of survival and fewer complications when we gave less blood. This practice has now been adopted worldwide. Should we cool children who suffered a severe brain injury? No! The labour-intensive therapy of cooling did not improve the outcome of these critically ill children. Consequently, cooling is no longer advocated for brain-injured children. Our research saves lives, improves the way critically ill or injured patients are cared for, and reduces costs to our healthcare system. Our work has changed the practice of critical care medicine world-wide. Our plan: Over the next 5 years, we plan to build a new infrastructure to enhance our research, expand our mentorship, and increase our impact on the outcomes of critically ill children and adults. We will accomplish this by forging new relationships, creating more innovative studies and providing resources to our researchers. This means engaging patients and healthcare policy-makers to help us develop the most relevant research programs, then evaluate them carefully. We will study the quality of care provided in the ICU, and develop tools such as common databases and standardized procedures to facilitate cost-effective research. We will investigate novel ways to ensure that important research findings are translated into better care more quickly. We will improve training for our junior colleagues, formalize the community mentoring they receive, and ensure that our more experienced investigators remain competitive, to sustain our legacy into the future.