Variation in Emergency Department Experience With Pediatric Critical Illness

We sought to describe variation in emergency department (ED) volume of pediatric critical illness encounters, and to assess the geographic proximity of encounters at low-volume EDs relative to high-volume EDs.

We conducted a retrospective cohort study of the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project State Emergency Department and Inpatient Databases for 5 states from 2018 to 2022. Critical illness was defined as death, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or endotracheal intubation in the ED or on hospital day 0 or 1 or ED critical care time billing. We calculated the ED-level incidence of critical illness and dichotomized EDs into low- or high-volume at the 75th percentile of volume for each state and year. We determined how many encounters at low-volume EDs occurred within a 15-minute drive of a high-volume ED.

Of 14,313,896 pediatric ED encounters across 569 EDs, 40,483 (0.3%) were critical. The median ED managed 1,932 pediatric visits each year (interquartile range [IQR] 680 to 5,068) and 5 (IQR 1 to 14) with critical illness. We identified 181 (31.8%) EDs with a calendar year with no pediatric critical illness. We found 1,557 (16.8%) critically ill children were managed in low-volume EDs within a 15-minute drive of a high-volume ED.

Most EDs infrequently care for critically ill children, and a minority of these encounters could be realistically diverted to high-volume EDs. Direct transport to high-volume centers is unlikely to be a universal strategy for ensuring access to high-quality emergency care for critically ill children.