This page is a research page. For clinical information, please view our Kids cardiac service page on the Sydney Children's Hospitals Network website.
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The Kids Heart Research group is the research arm for the Heart Centre for Children based at both The Children’s Hospitals at Westmead and Sydney Children's Hospital, Randwick. Our research aims for excellence in care and optimising outcomes for patients and their families. We do this by making new discoveries into childhood, familial and adult congenital heart diseases, and developing better diagnostic methods, improving holistic and family-centered care, and developing or improving medical, psychosocial, interventional and surgical treatments. We collaborate locally, nationally, and internationally to improve the health of people of all ages with childhood heart disease and their families.
We have four research themes: genetics (congential heart disease and inherited heart conditions), psychological, bioengineering and clinical research. We collaborate with researchers from external research and university institutes.
Objectives
Our research is holistic, multidisciplinary, collaborative and translational, aiming for excellence in clinical practice and patient care. We aim to encourage research into all aspects of childhood heart disease, support and empower new and established researchers from a wide range of disciplines and embed research within our routine clinical care.
Our research outcomes are used to maximise any child’s potential from before they’re born, to immediate surgical care and in the long-term. Translation of our research into clinical practice across the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network and into the wider community is our ultimate goal.
Impact
- We are devising a new approach to heart valves with the bioengineering of 3D printed heart valves that will grow with patients, reducing the number of open-heart surgeries for patients over their lives, and allowing for a ‘personalised medicine’ future for patient care.
- With a focus on the heart-mind-body connection, our work seeks to understand the mechanisms that influence neurodevelopment and mental health for people with congenital heart disease. Our goal is to develop therapies and interventions that improve the health and wellbeing of infants, children, adolescents, and adults with congenital heart disease across the world.
- We are conducting a trial that assesses how exercise can improve a single ventricle patient’s quality of life with a team of exercise physiologists and cardiologists.
- We are active in the development and participation of multiple registries, which supports researcher access to community data and directly improves patient care.
- The genetics research program and the Kids Heart BioBank, both developed in Kids Heart Research, have contributed to many significant advances in understanding the genetic causes of congenital heart disease and continue to support collaborative research efforts in the field.
- Read more about our research in our 2022-2023 Annual Impact Report.
Collaborators
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Prof Jonathan Skinner
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Dr Gillian Blue
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Prof Gary Sholler AM
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Prof Nadine Kasparian
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Dr Julian Ayer
More team members
- Rebecca Henderson - Research Manager
- Ruby King - Research Support Officer