Dr Heather Duncan completed undergraduate education in South Africa and qualified in Paediatrics and Paediatric Intensive Care in the UK, following a Fellowship in Critical Care at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in 2003.
She is a full-time Paediatric Intensive Care Consultant and Paediatric Intensive Care Associate Clinical Director (clinical lead) at Birmingham Children’s Hospital – the largest single-site Paediatric Intensive Care unit in the country.
Dr Duncan has broad research interests in clinical service development, quality improvement, risk reduction and innovation in healthcare, although her main focus has been on developing a Paediatric Early Warning system to reduce cardiac arrest.
She is currently leading on the pioneering RAPID (Real-Time Adaptive and Predictive Indicator of Deterioration) study – the first of its type in the world.
The project, due to be completed in late 2017, is taking place at Birmingham Children’s Hospital in collaboration with McLaren Applied Technologies, Isansys Lifesciences, Aston and Birmingham Universities.
RAPID is developing adaptive models for patient-specific early warning and has introduced interesting dialogue on how healthcare can learn from motorsport and applied mathematical analysis developed in finance and environmental monitoring to detect changing patterns in patient physiology.
