Non-EMS PICU Admissions: Why Not 911?

Science Center A254

My mentor, Dr. Michael Forbes of Akron Children’s Hospital, and I sought to explore whether it is better for a critically ill child to arrive at the hospital by Emergency Medical Services (EMS) or private vehicle (nEMS). This is a critical question to ask as 25 million children arrive at the emergency room every year accounting for a quarter of visits, yet they are two and a half times less likely than adults to use EMS. To answer our question, we looked at the epidemiology and geographic distributions of all of Akron Children’s Hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit admissions from 2009 to 2016. We compared length of stay, acuity, risk of mortality, age, and distance to get a sense of how EMS versus nEMS transports fair. We found mortality was lower in the EMS population despite higher acuity. We also found an incredibly wide range to nEMS transports although the distribution is concentrated in northeast Ohio. This information will likely have an impact on the design of future prospective studies as well as increased education efforts on the benefits of EMS.