Prakarn Tovichien

I am Dr Prakarn Tovichien, a Pediatric Pulmonologist at the Faculty of Medicine, Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok. It was my great honour to receive the APSR / Peter Sly Paediatric Lung Disease Young Investigator Award at the APSR 2021 Congress.

My presentation is about the effectiveness of home respiratory care training programmes and family support (HRCTFS) using telemedicine for tracheostomized children admitted with bacterial tracheostomy-associated respiratory tract infections (bTARTIs) with a focus on reducing admission days, the cost of admission, ICU admission rates and increasing the caregiver’s confidence. The APSR Congress was a valuable experience for me to share my work at the international level. I hope that it may inspire other audiences to develop quality improvement projects regarding HRCTFS in their hospitals. I would be proud if the example of our work developing HRCTFS using telemedicine can make tracheostomized children elsewhere receive better care and have a better quality of life. I would like to express my gratitude to the APSR Congress organizing committee, Prof. Sly and my colleagues at the Division of Paediatric Pulmonology, Siriraj Hospital for all the support. This opportunity inspired me to carry on my research in the field of paediatric lung disease and to innovate new ideas into challenging research to improve the care of children with respiratory diseases in the future.

During the paediatric young investigation award sessions, I broadened my research experience and received new motivation from other presentations; one about paediatric lung transplantation experiences from the Republic of Korea which I had no experience with; another about the relationship between wheezing and developmental trajectory of nasopharyngeal microbiome in Chinese toddlers; and thirdly, challenging cases of bronchiolitis obliterans from Cambodia. These motivated me to apply scientific knowledge to deepen my understanding about the pathogenesis of respiratory diseases and to hopefully write more interesting case reports with educational value in the future.

Apart from the research presentations, I was also impressed by various interesting up-to-date presentation topics from many well-known global speakers. Many talks promoted my curiosity, motivated me to deepen my learning and enhanced my point of view on the differences between pediatric and adult respiratory diseases. Moreover, many speakers also shared ways demonstrating how we can run our respiratory services in response to the COVID-19 pandemic including aerosol generating procedures such as pulmonary function testing, sleep laboratories and bronchoscopy procedures, which can be usefully adapted in my future practice. During the pediatric sessions, I also learned about the development of preschool asthma induced by viral infection and gained new experience of respiratory therapy for children using biphasic Cuirass ventilation which is unavailable in my hospital.

I am looking forward to joining the APSR 2022 Congress next year in the Republic of Korea to meet colleagues in the field of respiratory diseases face to face and hopefully have a chance for collaboration between one another to help children in our region achieve better lung health in the future.

Prakarn Tovichien