Liisa Saare

The PDCO is an advisory committee tasked with assessing paediatric investigation plans in accordance with European pediatric regulation

As a paediatric infectious diseases specialist, my primary focus is on evaluating antimicrobials and vaccines that are in the pipeline

Specialised in treating children with general paediatrics and paediatric infectious disease-related concerns at a primarily outpatient clinic.

I have coordinated the development of seven national guidelines using the GRADE approach.

My responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• helping the guideline working group on developing the scope of the guideline;
• teaching the secretariat how to systematically search for evidence, understand and prepare it, and present it to the working group using GRADEpro;
• consulting the working group on formulating recommendations based on evidence and additional criteria using the GRADE approach ;
• preparing the guideline manuscript and presenting it to the Guideline Advisory Board.
• Estonian national guidelines can be found at ravijuhend.ee, latest guideline approved that I advised on: https://ravijuhend.ee/tervishoiuvarav/juhendid/256/sepsise-ja-septilise-soki-ravijuhend-esmane-diagnostika-ja-ravivotted-ajakohastatud

As the Operational Contact Point for ECDC's Point Prevalence Survey (HAI-PPS), I coordinated the 'Point Prevalence Survey of Healthcare-Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Use in European Acute Care Hospitals' in 20 active-care hospitals in Estonia. My responsibilities included but were not limited to:

• translating the survey protocol into Estonian, and disseminating it to participating hospitals;
• developing and providing training materials and presentations, as well as planning a training day for the hospitals;
• during data collection, serving as the primary contact for hospitals, addressing their queries, and providing support;
• being a member of the validation team, which conducted a validation survey concurrently with the main study;
• collecting data from all hospitals, submitting it to the ECDC, and subsequently reviewing the analysed results;
• presenting the study findings to the participating hospitals.

The health system performance assessment (HSPA) framework enabled to have a clear health information system governance and an agreement on a systematised list of health system monitoring indicators and objectives.

My responsibilites in this project included but were not limited to:

• increasing analytical capacity by setting up university training about the HSPA;
• engaging masters students of public health and medical students to take an active part in implementation of the framework (e.g., indicator validation and measurement);
• supervised a masters' thesis on a subject related to the HSPA (patient quality indicators, thesis defending in spring of 2025);
• supporting institutions on how to train analysts who already were working.

As a locum doctor, I treated children in an outpatient clinic, mainly with general paediatrics-related concerns.

As a locum doctor, I treated children mainly with developmental problems.