About 80% of emergency departments aren’t fully prepared to care for kids. Upgrading them would be a highly cost-effective way to save lives, a study found.
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 published 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.
