Lumen Autumn 2025 - Flipbook - Page 10
Research
From the first breaths
Professor Michael Stark is the leader of RRI’s Neonatal
Medicine Group, as well as the Head of Neonatal Services at
the hospital. “I’ve been here for 15 years now and, over that
time, advances in our ability to care for the most pre-term babies
means delivery at 23 weeks is now not uncommon,” he says.
Effie and Georgie Koufalus could not hold their precious baby girl
Madelin for the first three weeks of her life.
Born on 22 February 2016, Madelin weighed only 480 grams
when she arrived at 23 weeks and three days and was taken to
the Women’s and Children’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care
Unit (NICU).
“For us, the first 5 to 10 minutes after delivery is crucial.
We’ve done some pretty great stuff with patients, but we still lose
some. I deliver a lot of those messages to families because it is
quite a tough specialty.”
“She was my third pregnancy, the first was born still at 20 weeks
and our second had anencephaly,” said Effie. “After seven rounds
of IVF, Madelin was our miracle baby.”
As RRI’s almost 50 research groups focus on different aspects
of early life, Professor Stark leads a multidisciplinary team centred
on improving neonatal survival free of neurodevelopmental
impairments.
Madelin spent 150 days in hospital, and like many babies within
the NICU, was part of life-saving trials through the University of
Adelaide’s Robinson Research Institute.
There are 14 intensive care beds and 35 special care beds for
babies born at, or transferred to, the WCH. For some, the
treatments they receive as part of their care double as trials for RRI.
“Of course we said yes, we wanted to help any other families
that we could,” Effie says. “It’s also one of the reasons I started
volunteering at the hospital cafe – I wanted to give back.”
“Some of the babies in the unit might be in a couple of trials at
once,” Professor Stark says.
The Robinson Research Institute (RRI) is opposite the
Women’s and Children’s Hospital. The researchers in the Institute
focus on solving the puzzle of healthy human reproduction and
child development.
“Sometimes, time doesn’t allow to seek permission before we
deliver treatment for a condition, so we’ll deliver the treatment and
then go back and explain to the parents what we did, an approach
called deferred consent.
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