Acute Care Medicine

The Discipline of Acute Care Medicine brings together teaching and research activities in the specialties of anaesthesia, intensive care, pain medicine, hyperbaric medicine and emergency medicine.

Extensive undergraduate teaching

The Discipline of Acute Care Medicine provides teaching to medical students in anaesthesia, incorporating perioperative medicine; acute and chronic pain medicine; and intensive care medicine. This primarily takes place in fifth and sixth years, but with Medical and Scientific Attachments (MSAs) also provided in fourth year.

Direct, dedicated clinician teaching is provided across three hospitals—the Royal Adelaide (RAH), The Queen Elizabeth (TQEH), and Lyell McEwin (LMH)—and a considerable amount of traditional ward, theatre, recovery room-, and advanced recovery room-based teaching is also delivered.

Rotations in Emergency Medicine across Modbury Hospital, LMH, TQEH and RAH involve teaching time, clinical exposure, logs of case studies and presentations and simulation. Internships are also provided in these hospitals for all sixth-year students.  

Teaching on sixth-year Common and Core Skills programs includes dedicated teaching on acute-care-medicine-related topics. Fellows provide tutorials on preparation for internship, applied physiology, and pharmacology of acute medical issues, while overseas elective students continue to be supported by clinical titleholders.

Wide-ranging research

The Discipline of Acute Care Medicine contributes to four core Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences research areas: pregnancy and birth; child and adolescent health; surgical and health systems innovation; health economics; and translational health outcomes.

A number of postgraduate students and clinical titleholders are involved in a variety of research projects, including a broad range of clinical trials across the discipline’s sub-specialties. These projects and trials are investigating such areas as:

• health care delivery (pre- and postoperative care, hospital medical emergency response systems)
• perioperative medicine – through the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) Clinical Trials Network 
• health economics
• intensive care medicine
• nutrition and metabolism in the critically ill
• sepsis in intensive care patients
• pharmacology and pharmacokinetics of anaesthetic and analgesic agents
• acute and chronic pain
• postoperative pain management
• clinical audits
• hyperbaric medicine
• emergency medicine
• obstetric and gynaecological anaesthesia
• paediatric anaesthetic
• paediatric critical care
• paediatric emergency medicine.

The discipline is also involved in multi-centre clinical trials in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine, internationally and nationally.

PARC Clinical Research (PARC)

PARC is a specialised clinical facility established within both the Discipline of Acute Care Medicine and Central Adelaide Local Health Network to undertake investigator-initiated and contract clinical research for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. It provides a safe and suitable environment for the conduct of academic clinical studies. It is involved in early phase, including first-in-human, and later phases clinical trials for almost all medical and surgical specialties.

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