National Critical Care Research Platform (NCCR) commences and website launch

This year has marked the commencement of the National Critical Care Research Platform (NCCR). This program will involve five years of work to establish a learning health care system to improve the outcome for patients diagnosed with sepsis. This program has been supported by a Medical Research Future Fund early and mid-career grant, which will help to build capacity and infrastructure aimed at improving the experiences and outcomes of patients diagnosed with sepsis who are admitted to an intensive care unit.

The program is made up of three interconnected areas of work. The first is joint research and priority setting, involving engagement with consumers, carers, and clinicians. The aim is to co-design future sepsis projects and build an Australian Critical Care Sepsis Research Roadmap. The second is the development of IT infrastructure to allow sustainable data integration. This infrastructure and information should allow greater efficiency in reporting and research activities. The third and final area of work involves translation, development of benchmarking, evidence summaries, and potentially clinical guidelines.

The project is a collaboration between early to mid-career and senior intensive care clinician-researchers and consumers from Australia and New Zealand. These individuals are connected through their association with the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS) and Sepsis Australia. They have a strong track record in undertaking clinical trials and research involving large national registries in critically ill patients with sepsis.

Since the commencement of the project just 5 months ago, the team has made strong foundational progress, commencing scoping work on the IT infrastructure build, the commencement of reviews to establish patient-reported outcome experience measures (PROEMS) for patients with sepsis, the commencement of observational studies to provide baseline information on outcomes for critically ill patients with sepsis, and the creation of a website and logo to provide a platform to communicate with clinicians and consumers.