Most U.S. hospital emergency departments -; lacking staffing, training and equipment -; are not fully prepared to care for children.
Maximizing their readiness to handle pediatric emergencies would be a cost-effective way to save children's lives, according to a new Stanford Medicine-led study. The study, which will publish Oct. 7 in Health Affairs, is based on data from hundreds of hospitals in 11 states.
About 80% of emergency departments are not highly prepared to treat children, they found. The research team studied whether it would be cost-effective to upgrade these less-prepared emergency departments to make them more ready to treat babies, children and teens. Doing so would cut deaths of pediatric emergency patients by almost half, and the cost would be reasonable by industry standards, they found.
Delivering appropriate, timely care to kids with injuries or acute illnesses can make the difference between complete recovery and many years of disability or childhood death. We found that the cost of being ready was well below the threshold that people think of as 'value for money' in health care." Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, PhD, study's senior author, professor of health policy "This finding is actionable and could have broad impact," Goldhaber-Fiebert added, noting that across the country, there are about 30 million pediatric emergency department visits per year.
The study's lead author is Christopher Weyant, PhD, who was a postdoctoral scholar in primary care and outcome.