Perfusion research

Pay in the destination countries

Monthly, in US dollars. Each country is an Imora admission package — open one for that route's fees, language requirement and deadline.

What does the day look like?

A research-track perfusionist still covers clinical cases plus research. In the operating room you run cardiopulmonary bypass on a heart-lung machine such as LivaNova Stockert S5 or S5 Pro, ECMO on systems such as Maquet Cardiohelp, ventricular assist device support, cell salvage, cardioplegia delivery, anticoagulation by activated clotting time, arterial blood gas and electrolyte management, circuit priming, safety checks, and perfusion records. Research work is protocol design, ethics submissions, Good Clinical Practice documentation, device bench testing and animal lab runs, data extraction from the perfusion record and EuroPerfusion or local registries, statistical analysis in R or SPSS or SAS, manuscript drafting and response to reviewers, and training junior perfusionists on a study device.

A plausible split is 40% operating room and extracorporeal life support cover including on call, 30% trial paperwork and data cleaning, 20% writing and grant work, 10% teaching and audit. The pump run during heart surgery is the visible part, but it is less than 40% of the week with research included. Night work, weekend cover and on call for emergency bypass and ECMO are standard in academic centres. In device companies night cover is replaced by travel to study sites.

Where does this lead?