Outcome Assessment in Children Requiring Interfacility Transport

Janine E. Janosky, Ph.D. - Statistician

Interfacility transport is a significant component of Emergency Medical Services for Children, but very little data has been disseminated or published to describe transport outcome and appropriateness of transport team selection. Critically ill and injured children often travel significant distances en route to a pedriatric critical care center and are at significant risk of dying and experiencing unplanned events (morbidity) during transport, especially when transport personell are uncomfortable or are not trained to care for pediatric emergencies. The project goal is to study transport outcome among transport systems that have different livels and types of pediatric training. Pretransport risk of mortality will be used to adjust for patient severity as comparisons are made between transport systems for patient morbidity and need for intervention. The potential impact in quality of care, access to care, and cost containment in identifying patients who truly need the most sophisticated level of pediatric transport and those who do not is enormous.Assessing transport outcome for differences in morbidity, and perhaps even mortality, is an important step in evaluating how important the pediatric training and educational needs are in the transport arena - an overall of the EMSC program.