Today was the launch of the journal club at the Ola During Children’s Hospital. Two professors, seven national doctors and three expatriate doctors sat together in an office for the first meeting of its kind.
The journal club was launched as a part of the postgraduate training program in pediatrics that will hopefully kick off in early 2011 (more on this soon). Similar meetings held in the hospital or soon to be held include the morbidity and mortality review, the tutorial topics, lectures, grand rounds and the perinatal meeting. The momentum for an academic atmosphere is exciting.
The journal article chosen for today’s event was published a mere three weeks ago in the Lancet and depicts a trial comparing intravenous artesunate versus the gold standard of intravenous quinine for the treatment of severe malaria in children. This is a very relevant topic in a country where malaria is endemic. Malaria leads to a high number of hospital admissions and contributes greatly to the death rate in children younger than 5 years. To give you an idea, in October 466 out of 981 new admissions were diagnosed with severe malaria (not all laboratory confirmed) and 45% of the total hospital deaths were attributed to severe malaria.
One of the national doctors gave an excellent summary of the article including the methods, results and discussion points. His summary formed the basis for a discussion by the professor on the importance of criticizing such studies – pointing out both the positive and negative aspects of the trial. As this was the first time to evaluate such trials, she further discussed the research process and involvement of various players in research.
We then moved on to the application of the discussion points to clinical practice in the hospital. This to me is one of the most important parts of these meetings. Yes, it is good to discuss trials and outcomes and point out whether or not the trial was performed well but in the end one needs to analyze whether or not clinical practice is evidence based and whether or not it needs to be adapted.
The outcome of this trial is that intravenous artesunate is superior to intravenous quinine in the treatment of severe malaria with artesunate substantially reducing the mortality rate in children. Artesunate is said to be simple, safe and effective.
This sounds good and it seems like the best thing to do would be to switch to using intravenous artesunate in the hospital, however, in a place where artesunate is not affordable and scarcely available this is not a sustainable treatment option. So, we have to look at what we can do, which is make sure our use of quinine to treat severe malaria is optimal. You see, when reading the article I was reminded that the preferred way of administering quinine is intravenous rather than intramuscular and 8 hourly instead of 12 hourly. So I brought this up. This of course led to an interesting discussion and critical look at our treatment choice.
Yes, the doctors know intravenous is better than intramuscular, however, for various reasons (poor monitoring of a child’s blood sugar, poor monitoring of infusion rates, lack of fluids and other resources, lack of nursing staff) they choose to prescribe it intramuscularly arguing that it is safer in most cases and generally as effective. Of course, they give this 12 hourly to decrease the chance of an injection abscess. We discussed the issue and went back and forth, deciding to consult the guidelines. Seeing as the World Health Organization recently published the 2010 Treatment Guidelines for Malaria it seemed like a good place to look. So, based on the information and the high cost of intravenous artesunate (although a good cost analysis should be done of iv quinine versus iv artesunate), the patients will continue to receive quinine, but 8 hourly. When possible they will receive it as an infusion rather than as an intramuscular injection but in reality we will have to see how that works.
All in all I would say that the journal club was a success leading to a critical look at malaria treatment at the Children’s Hospital, which will hopefully lead to better outcomes for children coming in with severe malaria. This was a good start to the journal club.
As posted on the BMJ website: http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2010/12/13/sandra-lako-journal-club/
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