Deviation From National Dosing Recommendations for Children Having Out-of-Hospital Emergencies

Previous evaluations of medication dosing variance for children in the prehospital setting have been limited regionally or to specific conditions. We sought to describe pediatric dosing deviations from nationally recommended guidelines for commonly administered medications from a registry of prehospital encounters.

We evaluated prehospital patient care records for children (<18 years) from approximately 2000 emergency medical services agencies from 2020 to 2021. We investigated dosing deviations (defined as being ≥20% of the weight-appropriate dose from national guidelines) for the following: lorazepam, diazepam, and midazolam for seizures; fentanyl, hydromorphone, morphine, and ketorolac; intramuscular epinephrine and diphenhydramine for children with allergy or anaphylaxis; intravenous epinephrine; and methylprednisolone.

Of 990 497 pediatric encounters, 63 963 (6.4%) received at least 1 nonnebulized medication. Among nonnebulized doses, 53.9% were for the studied drugs. Among encounters who received a study drug and which had a documented weight (80.3%), the overall consistency with national guidelines was 42.6 per 100 administrations. Appropriate dosing was most common with methylprednisolone (75.1%), intramuscular epinephrine (67.9%), and ketorolac (56.4%). Medications with the lowest consistency with national guidelines were diazepam (19.5%) and lorazepam (21.2%). Most deviations represented an underdose, which was greatest with lorazepam (74.7%) and morphine (73.8%). Results were similar when estimating dosages from weights calculated by age.

We identified variance in weight-based dosing from national guidelines for common pediatric medications in the prehospital setting, which may be attributable to protocol differences or dosing errors. Addressing these should be a target for future educational, quality improvement, and research activities.