Staff Profile: Professor Franz Babl
Professor Franz Babl has been reappointed as the Professor of Paediatric Emergency Medicine at the University of Melbourne. His main role is to drive national and international research and research collaboration in acute care research in children.
As an emergency physician also based at the Royal Children’s Hospital and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, his research and clinical work is focused on improving the evidence base for acute care of children. This includes interventional studies to generate new evidence as well as research on how to get front line clinicians to actually change practice and implement new evidence- or, just as often, to stop them from providing low value care (known as de-implementation research).
Pictured: Professor Franz Babl.
The core of his research work is based at the Parkville campus yet due to the low frequency of critical events in paediatrics, it is often necessary to plan studies across multiple sites. A critical tool has been the development of a highly functional Australian and New Zealand paediatric emergency research network - PREDICT (Paediatric Research in Emergency Departments International Collaborative) – of which Franz was the founding chair, and which has been funded by three consecutive Centre of Research Excellence grants. This network can tap into all tertiary children’s hospitals as well as a large network of urban and suburban emergency departments in Australia and New Zealand. Most recently, this network has expanded to regional and rural hospitals in Australia, which brings a challenging and rewarding new facet to the research. For studies which require even larger numbers of participants, PREDICT is in a formal collaboration with overseas research networks via the Pediatric Emergency Research Network (PERN).
In the last 3 months, four of his major studies have all come to completion which cover all three spectra of this work- local, national and international.
A campus randomised trial (Concussion Essentials) has shown conclusively that children and adolescents with ongoing concussion symptoms do better with targeted, individualised psychologist and physiotherapist intervention over the traditional approach of “usual care” without specific interventions provided (published in British Journal of Sports Medicine).
A 47-centre international trial called PROMPT BOLUS through the PREDICT and PERN networks investigated what type of intravenous fluid children with sepsis should receive. The study enrolled more than 8000 patients and was funded by MRFF and NIH (published in the New England Journal of Medicine).
Two challenging multicentre studies via the PREDICT network are as yet unpublished but have recently been presented at international conferences. The Study of Neck Injuries in Children (SONIC) enrolled more than 13,000 children and investigated the optimal strategy to decide which children should receive an Xray or other imaging test after an injury. The Pharmacological Emergency management of Agitation in Children and Young people: a randomized trial of intraMuscular medication (PEAChY-M) trial enrolled 348 children and adolescents with severe acute behavioural disturbance who required the injection of medications at one of 10 emergency departments. Both studies had been funded by MRFF grants. All studies provided excellent platforms for PhD students through the Departments of Paediatrics or Critical Care.