'The first time I stepped into the ICU, I fell in love with the environment. I loved the teamwork - the team are incredibly important to how we care for our patients. The ability to treat patients when they're at their most vulnerable is a real privilege.'
Professor Carol Hodgson from the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre at Monash University was awarded the 2024 Elizabeth Blackburn Investigator Grant Award in Clinical Medicine and Science (Leadership). Professor Hodgson’s research career has focused on better understanding the impact of critical illness on recovery, including physical, psychological and cognitive functional outcomes of survivors.
- Video transcript
Professor Carol Hodgson 0:00
My name is Carol Hodgson. I'm from the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre at Monash University, and I'm very honoured to be receiving this Elizabeth Blackburn Award tonight. It feels a little bit surreal to be honest, particularly to be grouped with somebody who's been such a giant in science across the world. I think there's been a couple of turning points for me. My work is all related to critically ill patients, and the first time I stepped into the ICU, I fell in love with the environment. I loved the teamwork - the team are incredibly important to how we care for our patients. And also just the ability to treat patients when they're at their most vulnerable is a real privilege, and it's something that I've never taken for granted, and something that I've really wanted to work on, so that I advocate and do my best for my patients at all times. The first time that I stepped into our Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Clinical Trials Group meeting and I heard some of the groundbreaking, multi-centre, global research that was being conducted, I just thought to myself, I want to be part of that. I've spent the last 15 years building my career to do that. I'm not sure if I know about the next biggest development, but I certainly know in our area, which is critical care research, we have a lot to learn from other areas. So I think cancer research, for example, has been incredibly clever with precision medicine. And I think that it's time that we started to look at precision medicine for our critically ill patients. At the moment, we do these great big trials, and it's one size fits all, and we give them all the same intervention without really taking into account the dose, the type, the timing. And I think that the more that we can do that, the better our patients will recover. And for me, it's about looking at long term recovery. So in the past, our critical care trials have focused really on mortality, and my focus has very much been with a physiotherapy background on functional recovery. So I think that it's most important for us to move beyond just mortality, look at patient centred outcomes, include the patients in the research that we're doing, making sure that it's co designed so that it's acceptable to clinicians, researchers, but to patients and families as well. And then to look at precision medicine, so that we're being really precise with what we prescribe in a very personalised way.End of transcript