In my last post, I described the Pediatric Readiness Score and its components. Today, I’ll explain why maintaining a high score may benefit your trauma center and what it costs to do so.

Research groups at the Oregon Health Sciences University and the University of Utah combined multiple data sources to estimate current levels of ED pediatric readiness, the cost to achieve it, the number of pediatric deaths in emergency departments, and the number of potential lives saved if readiness is maintained.

As you can imagine, this was an extensive data set suffering from the usual glitches. The authors either excluded incomplete data or managed it with sophisticated statistical methods. Data was included from 4,840 emergency departments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Here are the factoids:

• The authors estimated that nearly 670,000 children receive care in the emergency departments each year
• Only 15% (842 EDs) had high readiness. The range was 2.9% in Arkansas to 100% in Delaware.
• The annual cost to achieve high pediatric readiness nationwide was approximately $210 million
• The annual cost per child to achieve high readiness ranged from $0 in Delaware to $11.84 in North Dakota
• It was estimated that about 28% of the 7619 childhood deaths each year could be prevented if the treating ED had high pediatric readiness

Bottom line: This paper has a lot of information to digest. Please remember that these are not precisely measured numbers but estimates based on statistical models. So, minor inaccuracies in those models could change these results.

Nonetheless, the data demonstrate the importance of maintaining high pediatric readiness in your emergency department.  Don’t let the total cost of readiness frighten you. Spread evenly across all the EDs studied, this amounts to only about $43,000 annually.

I urge all trauma centers to measure their pediatric readiness score. Then, dedicate the resources your hospital can afford to improve it as much as possible/practical. The number of potential pediatric lives saved is substantial and meaningful.

Reference: State and National Estimates of the Cost of Emergency Department Pediatric Readiness and Lives Saved. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(11):e2442154.