Reducing Disparities for Children in Rural Emergency Resuscitation (RESCU-ER)

Our overarching goal is to improve the delivery of safe and effective prehospital care for children and infants during emergencies and decrease disparities in outcomes. This project aims to understand contributors to childhood mortality, characterize adverse safety events (ASEs) in the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) care of children in rural and urban areas, and identify potential prevention or mitigation strategies. Because data to date are high-level frequencies from vital statistics, we do not know what proportion of childhood deaths interact with the health care system. The same conditions that have been reported to contribute to disparities in child mortality are also leading conditions for EMS calls: trauma, cardiac arrest, respiratory failure, and seizures; thus, EMS likely plays a critical life-saving role, yet the nature of ASEs and best practices for prevention of such events in EMS care are largely unknown. We are a highly experienced team of NIH funded researchers dedicated to supporting and helping to improve the delivery of safe high-quality EMS care. In our initial NIH-funded work (R01HD062478), wedeveloped and validated a tool for the identification of ASEs and demonstrated that critically ill and injured children experience high rates of ASEs. Our project aligns directly with iPHD priorities: improving maternal and infant health and high value care and will provide critical scientific data to inform policies and procedures led by the HRSA-funded EMS for Children Innovation and Improvement Center (EIIC) and improve EMS care for urban and rural children and infants in New Jersey and nationally.