OBJECTIVES To describe the creation of an Emergency Medical Services for Children (EMSC) research agenda specific to multicenter research. Given the need for multicenter research in EMSC and the unique opportunity afforded by the creation of the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN), the authors revisited existing EMSC research agendas to develop a PECARN-specific research ...

INTRODUCTION High performing clinical decision rules (CDRs) have been derived to predict which head-injured child requires a computed tomography (CT) of the brain. We set out to evaluate the performance of these rules in the Singapore population. MATERIALS AND METHODS This is a prospective observational cohort study of children aged less than 16 who presented to the emergency department (ED) ...

UNLABELLED Up to 3 million US children are cared for by emergency medical services (EMSs) annually. Limited research exists on pediatric prehospital care. The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) mission is to perform high-quality research for children, including prehospital research. Our objective was to develop a pediatric-specific prehospital research agenda. METHODS ...

OBJECTIVE The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) traumatic brain injury (TBI) clinical prediction rules identify children with minor blunt head trauma who are at low risk for clinically important traumatic brain injuries. We measured the agreement between the registered nurse (RN) and physician (MD) assessments. METHODS We performed a cross-sectional study of all child...

BACKGROUND The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) is a federally funded multi-center research network. To promote high quality research within the network, it is important to establish evaluation tools to measure performance of the research sites. PURPOSE To describe the collaborative development of a site performance measure tool "report card" in an academic pediatric...

BACKGROUND To date, the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) rule for identifying children who are at very low risk of clinically-important traumatic brain injuries after minor head trauma has not been validated prospectively in an independent population. Our goal was to evaluate the diagnostic performance of the PECARN clinical decision rule in a French pediatric populati...

Since its formal recognition as a medical specialty, the field of pediatric emergency medicine has made substantial advances with respect to its scope and sophistication. These advances have occurred in clinical practice as well as in the research base to improve clinical practice. There remain, however, many areas in emergency medical services for children (EMSC) in the out-of-hospital, emerge...

Background/aim: Head injuries are commonly seen in the pediatric population. Noncontrast enhanced cranial CT is the method of choice to detect possible traumatic brain injury (TBI). Concerns about ionizing radiation exposure make the evaluation more challenging. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) rules in pre...

OBJECTIVE To examine the epidemiology of pediatric patient visits to emergency departments (ED). METHODS We conducted a cross-sectional study of pediatric ED visits at the participating Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) hospitals in 2002. We provide descriptive characteristics of pediatric ED visits and a comparison of the study database to the National Hospital Ambul...

Context The recognition of significant traumatic intracranial injuries is important and cranial CT is the gold standard for their diagnosis. However, CT bears risks associated with ionising radiation-induced malignancies, in particular in children. Three high-quality clinical decision rules (CDR) have been developed to assist with decision-making on whether or not to use a cranial CT scan in ch...