Children's Acute Surgical Abdomen Programme (CASAP)

CASAP aims is to characterise the type and quality of care being delivered to children undergoing urgent / emergency abdominal surgery (including appendicectomy). CASAP will be a prospective observational cohort study and will launch in Summer 2019.

With your help, we aim to enroll all children between the ages of 12 months and 16 years who undergo an emergency abdominal surgical procedure during the study period.

This will be a consenting research study, which will be adopted onto the NIHR portfolio as a result of generous funding from the Association of Paediatric Anaesthetists - therefore recruitment of patients will count towards your hospital's NIHR targets and bring research money in to support your future work.

Opportunity for Collaboration

We are very keen to build on the collaborative success of SNAP2, NELA, PQIP and other projects by engaging every eligible hospital in the UK.

We hope that this ambitious project will encourage cross-collaborative work between ourselves, surgeons and paediatricians, and, as with the SNAPs, we hope to encourage significant trainee engagement.

Ethics approval should come through shortly and after that, we will make contact with more information and paperwork about the project. As usual, all investigators will be named as collaborators in research outputs.

CASAP is being delivered in collaboration with the Association of Paediatric Anaesthetists and the British Association of Paediatric Surgeons and is sponsored by University College London Hospital.