Pressing play loads the video from YouTube. Privacy
Learning from every child: the PIVOTAL platform trial
- Professor Mark PetersProfessor of Paediatric Intensive Care at UCL and Great Ormond Street Hospital and Chief Investigator of the PIVOTAL platform trial
Key points
- The PIVOTAL platform trial examines sedative choice, intravenous fluid strategy and blood transfusion threshold at once across most ICU patients.
- Its Bayesian adaptive approach means the team can learn about the interventions as they go rather than wait for a trial to finish.
- Questions can potentially be answered in a relatively short time frame and replaced with new ones, so the team learns from every child.
Professor Mark Peters, Professor of Paediatric Intensive Care at UCL and Great Ormond Street Hospital and Chief Investigator of the PIVOTAL platform trial, provides insights into the trial’s approach to questions of routine care. He discusses the choice of sedative agents, intravenous fluid strategies and blood-transfusion thresholds. The interview explores how a Bayesian adaptive platform can evaluate several questions at the same time, learn from accumulating information and potentially introduce new questions as others are answered. Professor Peters reflects on the ambition to make research part of learning from every child admitted to intensive care.
This interview took place at the PCCS Annual Scientific Meeting 2026 in London.
Read the transcript
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors, so check it against the video before quoting.
As the chief investigator of the PIVOTAL platform trial, we are looking at aspects of routine care on paediatric critical illness, and that includes the primary choice of sedative agent, the intravenous fluid strategy and the threshold for blood transfusion, and we're doing it simultaneously across the majority of patients who come to the ICU.
So the questions we're addressing are important ones in themselves, but we're also learning about this methodology. This Bayesian adaptive approach means we can learn about the interventions as we go, and rather than run a trial that takes 10 years start to finish, we have the potential to be able to answer the questions in a relatively short time frame and potentially replace them with new questions. So the point is we want to get to where we're learning from every child that comes into intensive care unit in the UK.
Topics
Share
Cite this video
Professor Mark Peters. “Learning from every child: the PIVOTAL platform trial.” The Paediatric Video Journal, 7 November 2026. https://paediatricvj.com/videos/learning-from-every-child-the-pivotal-platform-trial-peters/
This interview is educational content intended for healthcare professionals and is not medical advice. Views expressed are those of the speaker. © The Paediatric Video Journal. All rights reserved.