Further Contributions of Mr. Rene Chang In The Medical Field

By November 9, 2018Current Affairs

Further Contributions of Mr. Rene Chang In The Medical Field

By Anthony Chang

I am most grateful to St. Georges Hospital, London, UK  for the tribute to Mr. Rene Chang,  as a dedicated Renal Transplant Surgeon.

I had the privilege of working with Rene since 1988, when he introduced and taught me Intensive Care Medicine, now referred to as Critical Care Medicine. This is another side of Rene’s illustrious medical career.

Whilst working in the Armed Forces Hospital, Riyadh, Rene performed the first ever transplant in Saudi Arabia.  He also developed a Nutritional Software for the ICU, reviewing patients who were fed on TPN or ENT. Rene was a self-taught software programmer. His nutritional software, which led to major changes in nutritional therapy in ICUs that reduced drastically the mortality rate, led him to develop the Riyadh ICU Program (RIP), based on the APACHE II (Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation Disease Classification System), which was tested in some 20 ICUs around the world, supported by a grant by the Saudi Ministry of Health.

RIP was the world’s first PC based Clinical Audit Program for ICUs and Rene is recognised as a pioneer and international expert in severity scoring in Intensive Care Medicine.

Rene published widely on Intensive Care Medicine and in 1996, both of us, contributed and participated in the formation of GB Intensive Care Society and  ICNARC (Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre), which all UK ICUs participate today.

Rene founded MASH (Medical Associated Software House Ltd) as a non-profit organisation to fund independent research in Intensive Care Medicine in 1988.

Although Rene was not an Intensivist, he is very well known and respected by the European Intensive Care Society and was the Scientific Advisor to the World Congress of Intensive Care Medicine in 1994. 

Rene will always be recognised as a pioneer in the field of Renal Transplantation and Intensive Care Medicine in the UK and world-wide. 

Rene’s work in auditing the clinical performance of ICUs was recognised with a full page editorial in the Lancet in 1994:

“… the impact of which will be felt in all avenues of medicine”.