Bernadette Bessick receives research award from the DIVI Foundation
30.11.2023 17:26
The DIVI Foundation's €5,000 research grant in the field of intensive care and emergency medicine will be awarded in 2023 to Bernadette Bessick, a physiotherapist at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. She is working on developing a scoring system in intensive care medicine to determine patients' physiotherapy treatment priorities. This should facilitate decision-making for intensive care specialists and also improve treatment outcomes.
"With increased demand for early physiotherapy intervention and limited personnel resources, intensive care specialists are often faced with an ethical dilemma regarding which patients should be treated with priority. Ms. Bessick's work is helping to improve this situation. We are pleased to be able to support her in the further development of this worthy project," said foundation board member and laudator Professor Gerhard W. Sybrecht at yesterday's award ceremony as part of DIVI23, the annual congress of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI), in Hamburg.
"Currently, in intensive care practice, the prioritization of patients who should receive physiotherapy treatment is still based less on evidence-based, objective criteria and more on subjective, clinical assessments," explains Bernadette Bessick. Researchers have previously developed a scoring algorithm for patients in cardiology and cardiac surgery intensive care units, the potential application of which to the UKE intensive care unit was tested in a pilot study. However, the results do not yet provide clear evidence, and the work dates back more than ten years. "I would like to pick up the thread again and build on the excellent study work that has been done so far," says Bessick.
Scoring system could reduce a lot of stress
The study is divided into four phases. Following a literature review and development of an interview guide (Phase 1), the study is currently in Phase 2. "I want to find out which criteria physicians, physiotherapists, and intensive care nurses currently use to make prioritization decisions. On this basis, and together with the findings from the literature review, I then want to develop a scoring system that is user-friendly, patient-centered, and also updateable," says Bessick. The system will then be tested initially in a pilot study (Phase 3) and finally in a validation study (Phase 4) on intensive care units, initially within the UKE and possibly also outside of it. "If we implement such a scoring system across the board, we could reduce a lot of ethical and moral stress," says Bessick.
Research funding for intensive and emergency medical professions
Since 2017, the DIVI Foundation has awarded research grants of €5,000 annually for projects in the field of intensive care and emergency medicine. This includes professions in healthcare, health promotion, medical therapy and diagnostics, and rehabilitation. The financial grant can be used for material resources and expenses that support the implementation of these scientific projects.