Emergency Medicine, Pain Management, Trauma Care, Prehospital Risk Stratification, Hyperbaric Medicine

Having defended my thesis on the subject pain management in the Emergency Department, this is still part of my current research line. At the moment we are doing a (ZonMw sponsored) multicenter RCT in which we evaluate whether the use of a continuous Fascia Iliaca Compartment Block (FICB) is effective in elderly hip fracture patients in treating pain and in preventing the occurrence of a delirium, as compared to standard care.

In January 2023 we plan to start a prehospital RCT in which we will compare Fentanyl to Esketamine in acute pain. Currently, we have acquired funding of the Royal Dutch Navy to perform this challenging RCT and are in the midst of the procedure of recruiting a PhD Candidate for this project, who will start on January 1st 2023. 

At the same time, several pain related projects have started under my supervision, done by residents and medical students who I'll supervise during their master thesis. Several of these manuscripts are about to get published. The research line of acute pain management will also include the implementation of a novel pain management protocol in the Emergency Departments of Amsterdam UMC. 

Regarding risk stratification, we perform several projects in the complete acute chain of prehospital medicine - emergency medicine - acute hospital admissions and how to predict the occurrence of acute severe illness in these patient populations.

Besides these major projects, I perform several smaller Emergency Department related projects regarding trauma care; acute diagnostics; critical care and cardiac output measurements; Covid-19 and hyperbaric and diving medicine.