Brett Burstein
Dr. Burstein obtained his medical degree from McGill University (2010), graduating from the combined M.D/Ph.D program with a doctorate from the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics (2008). He completed both his residency training in General Pediatrics (2013) and his fellowship in Pediatric Emergency Medicine (2015) at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, where he is currently a Pediatric Emergency physician and Trauma Team Leader. Dr. Burstein completed a MPH degree from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and was appointed as a Clinician-Scientist of the McGill University Health Centre Research Institute in 2018. His primary research interest is the management of fever in infants below 3 months of life. Fever among infants in the first three months of life remains one of the most commonly encountered clinical problems in all of pediatric healthcare. Although the majority of these infants have self-limited viral illnesses, approximately 10% harbour potentially life-threatening serious bacterial infections. Decisions must be made regarding the extent of investigations as well as the need for antibiotic treatment and hospitalization. Dr. Burstein’s research focuses on diagnostic testing and clinical decision tools to guide management of these infants, with the aim of balancing the risk of under-diagnosis and the potential harms of over-investigation. His work in this area has received a CIHR Professional Development Grant and national awards from the Canadian Paediatric Society and the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease of Canada.
Publications
neonatal fever, database research, Emergency Department resource utilization, clinical practice variation
febrile young infants, fever, sepsis, serious bacterial infections, invasive bacterial infections