Chris Bird

Demand on acute children’s services grows year on year in the UK. I’m interested in exploring ways to harness existing and future technologies to use minimally invasive diagnostics in real world settings. New diagnostics have the potential to help make safe clinical decisions for children, both in the community and in the emergency department. This technology should also potentially have other benefits - decreasing the use of painful procedures and radiation exposure in children.

I’m PI for the Paediatric Emergency Research in the UK and Ireland (PERUKI) network’s TravelFever study, which aims to evaluate the safety of using rapid diagnostic tests for malaria alone in children presenting with fever and who have recently returned from the tropics. I am also looking at point of care tests (POCT) to help rationalise investigations for children who present with atraumatic limp. The team, working with the paediatric surgeons at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, are also trialling POC tests for improved diagnosis of appendicitis. I led a pilot study at Birmingham Children’s Hospital looking at POCT for Group A Streptococcal pharyngitis, where the team brought about a sustained reduction in antibiotic prescribing for sore throat, often a viral infection