The Centre for Critical Illness Research is  a cross-faculty centre for academic excellence, focussing on critical illness. CCIR brings together interprofessional academics and clinicians to translate early scientific breakthroughs into effective prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for critical illness and to enable healthy critical illness survivorship for children and adults.

CCIR, a King’s Health Partners endeavour, is embedded within Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine at King’s College London. CCIR is the primary academic link to the Clinical Departments of Critical Care within the three King’s Health Partners partner NHS Foundation Trusts - Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley.

Across King’s Health Partners organisations, we have an unparalleled breadth of clinical critical care expertise consisting of ~250 critical care beds, ~2000 healthcare professionals, multiple commissioned clinical services and a complete portfolio of medical and surgical specialties. We serve one of the most ethnically, socially and economically diverse patient population of ~8 million.

CCIR mission

Our mission is translational research without boundaries to generate lasting health benefits for patients and families facing critical illness.

We deliver our mission by:

• Undertaking biological, physiological, applied clinical, and implementation research
• Providing actionable insights to inform national health policy
• Supporting capacity building and empowering the next generation of clinical academics

CCIR core values

Our Core Values are:

• Interdisciplinarity: Our research teams deliberately merge diverse expertise, facilitating the seamless translation of discoveries into bedside treatments. This inherently broadens our scientific portfolio.
• Collaboration: Our team science ethos is an enabler to push scientific frontiers by pursuing diverse ideas and novel methodologies.
• Commitment to Integrity: Transparency and research integrity are the cornerstones of our research culture.

CCIR Structure

CCIR consists of Administrative and Strategic, Research, and Education cores (Figure-1).

1. Administrative and Strategic core consists of Centre manager, coordinates Patient and Public Involvement & Engagement (PPIE) activities, Bioresource and fosters strategic partnerships across the academic, philanthropy and life-sciences industry sectors.
2. Research core consists of five ‘Research Focus Areas’ each containing ‘Research Themes’. The Research Focus Areas are
   • Patient and family-centred care
   • Ethics and clinical decision-making
   • Acute organ failure and extracorporeal technologies
   • Sepsis, pandemic sciences and host-response biology
   • Health services research, policy and practice
   Note: Paediatric and adult critical care research are separately listed.
3. Education core organises and coordinates state-of-the-art educational activities that reflect the research focus areas of the centre. These activities include courses and study days, clinical fellowships, visiting fellowships, specialist skills years, and MD/PhD programmes.