Since completing his pharmacy degree at the University of Queensland in 2006, Mr Paul Williams has worked as a community pharmacist and hospital pharmacist in Australia and New Zealand. At present, Paul is the Assistant Director of Pharmacy (Clinical) at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital (SCUH) and also an Intensive Care Pharmacist.
Paul began his MPhil in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Jason Roberts and Dr Menino Osbert Cotta in the area of optimising antimicrobial dosing in critical ill patients.
His current research project is to validate SCUH guideline based antimicrobial dosing in critically ill patients in terms of pharmacodynamic target attainment and clinical outcomes and compare these findings to a matched cohort of patients treated with Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) - based antimicrobial dosing.
Does guideline-based dosing of beta lactam antibiotics and vancomycin achieve the target drug concentrations more than therapeutic drug monitoring-based dosing in critically ill patients? (GUIDE TRIAL)
The primary outcome Paul is determining through the GUIDE trial is whether locally endorsed guideline based antibiotic dosing achieves pharmacodynamic target attainment of 100% fT>MIC for beta lactam antibiotics, or a steady state trough concentration of 15-20mg/L for vancomycin in critically ill patients.
In a future PhD project, Paul has ambitions to elaborate on his current work by focusing on:
• Validating dosing software packages (Bayesian forecasting software)
• Determininig accuracy of dosing software packages at predicting the concentrations observed from the GUIDE trial
• Design an international survey of antibiotic dosing and TDM in critically ill patients
• Conduct an in silico validation study of the Antimicrobial dosing in Critical Care leading to a dosing guideline
