Dr Margarita Burmester
MRCP FRCPCH FFICM MAcadMEd
Co director of The Bright Futures™ programme
Lead Consultant Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, Royal Brompton Hospital
Senior Lecturer, National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI)
Director SPRinT programme
Biography
Dr Margarita Burmester is the lead consultant paediatric intensivist at Royal Brompton Hospital, where she treats private and NHS patients.
As part of her training, Dr Margarita Burmester studied at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, Canada, and Great Ormond Street Hospital, London.
She has been a consultant at Royal Brompton Hospital since 2002, with a two-year sabbatical as consultant staff member at Boston Children’s Hospital.
She completed her postgraduate certification in clinical education in 2016 and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Authority (FHEA) and member of the Academy of Medical Educators (MAcadMEd)
Areas of expertise
Health check up
A health assessment is a preventative measure to help find health problems before they start. They can also tell whether a person is at risk of developing certain health problems.
Preventive Paediatrics
Preventive paediatrics is defined as the prevention of disease and the promotion of physical, emotional and social well-being of children to reach optimal growth and development.
Clinical expertise
Dr Burmester is an expert in all aspects of critical care in children and has given over 50 presentations to academic meetings throughout the world. She has led a team of 10 consultant paediatric intensivists since 2011, and specialises in improving children’s health.
She contributes to national strategy through advising the national paediatric critical care clinical reference group and in her role as vice president of the Paediatric Intensive care society (PICS). She has also been president of the paediatric section of the Royal Society of Medicine since 2018.
Dr Burmester is co-founder and director of The Bright Futures Programme (BFP), an extensive all-encompassing surveillance and screening programme designed to enable children to look forward to their brightest future possible.
Education
Margarita’s education interests are in improving patient care and safety through using simulation to teach inter-professional teamwork and systems improvement. In 2008, she founded the SPRinT (Simulated interPRofessional Team Training) programme at Royal Brompton Hospital in order to enhance patient care and safety at the frontline clinical environment through high level, high stakes in situ interprofessional simulated team training.
This award-winning, patient safety educational programme now trains over 100 interprofessional staff each year, and delivers facilitator courses for 50-60 professionals/year in human factors, leadership, team training and simulation regionally and nationally
She was a founding member of the CSSC (Clinical Skills and Simulation Centre) – a joint venture between Royal Brompton and Royal Marsden hospitals, and was a Board of Director member of the International Pediatric Simulation Symposia & Workshops (IPSSW) from 2011-14 and Secretary and Research Lead for the Paediatric Intensive Care Society Education, Learning and Simulation (PICSELS) group 2010-14.
Currently Dr Burmester enjoys executive membership of ASPiH (Association for Simulated Practice in Healthcare) since 2016, Simulation Co-Chair for Health Education North West London (HENWL) and sits on the simulation working group of the European Society of Paediatric & Neonatal Intensive Care (ESPNIC). She contributed to the Health Education England strategy for simulation based education 2018.
Dr Burmester is a senior lecturer at the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI), Imperial College London.
Research interests
Margarita has researched innovative adult learning techniques and how they can translate into clinical effectiveness and improvement. She has published multiple articles, delivered numerous lectures and workshops, and is a co-recipient of a Wellcome Trust award for research into micro- communication in teamwork.
Margarita has led on innovative research into new models targeted to simulated cardiac emergency training, including the patented Harley and TOM open chest models. These have been used to deliver new quality improvement strategies in patient care and safety.
She has contributed to international research through investigation of paediatric early warning scores, trialling methodologies to mitigate clinical deterioration. Margarita was awarded a Q (Quality) fellow (Health Foundation) since 2017 and has been a judge for the Health Service Journal (HSJ) Patient’s Safety Awards since 2016.