August 11, 2017 
Uncategorized 
Leila is a general paediatric trainee and your donations are helping to fund her joint clinical and research year.
The research being conducted is hugely important to patients and clinicians alike:
My research element is to look at what happens to CHD babies born at less than 35 weeks gestation, so if they’re more than 5 weeks early or weigh less than 2.5 kilos.
Pre or neonatal babies are all at heightened risk of getting infections and problems with their bowel and lungs as they’re not finished developing.
The idea is to get a clinical database of all the CHD babies looked after at LGI and Sheffield to find common threads.
She adds:
When we’re called to talk to a mum about a baby whose been born early with a heart problem, we can then give them some realistic info about what the future holds for them. Through this database we’re looking at things like survival – 30 day survival and a year survival. Also, how long are they in intensive care, or do they have lots with tummy infections. All this gives families a richer view. As a parent you can only prepare yourself so much, and when things happen it’s really good or bad news for families, but a bit of knowledge really helps. The research findings will also be brought into professional circles, like clinical conferences for example.
Previously, she mainly worked within the South Yorkshire region and explains how she developed an interest in paediatric cardiology:
We have registrar exams that we have to do so I went along to Dr John Thomson’s Sheffield clinic and just absolutely loved it, it was amazing. From then, I worked at a few of his clinics there and came across to the catheter labs here at Leeds General Infirmary.
Since then, Leila has continued to develop her passion for paediatric cardiology.
Leila will continue to learn to be a cardiologist, including being on the registrar rota and learning echo cardiography.
It’s been a really steep massive learning curve, there’s still so much to learn but it’s just fascinating. It’s fully confirmed what I want to do as a career.
