A multidisciplinary survey on capillary refill time: Inconsistent performance and interpretation of a common clinical test
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Capillary refill time is a common clinical test used in pediatric critical care and emergency medicine. Despite this, we hypothesize that capillary refill time is performed inconsistently and its interpretation by healthcare providers in the acute care setting is variable. DESIGN: Multidisciplinary survey. SETTING: Canadian tertiary care pediatric hospital. SUBJECTS: Subjects were 198 pediatric healthcare providers. INTERVENTIONS: A self-administered questionnaire survey was sent to healthcare providers in pediatric and neonatal critical care, emergency medicine, and cardiology. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Seventy-eight surveys were returned: 23 of 33 pediatric trainees (70%), 22 of 38 staff physicians (58%), and 33 of 125 nurses (26%). Ninety-five percent of pediatric healthcare providers reported performing capillary refill time on most patients. However, while 90% of nurses and 70% of trainees described performing capillary refill time on every patient, only 18% of staff physicians reported performing capillary refill time routinely on every patient. Although all participants responded that a capillary refill time of >3 secs was abnormal, responders were divided on the definition of normal capillary refill time. While other sites were described, responders most commonly reported performing capillary refill time on a patient's chest. Ninety-six percent of responders agreed that prolonged capillary refill time indicates abnormal perfusion. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this single-institution survey show that while most nurses and pediatric trainees reported using capillary refill time on every patient as a test for perfusion, only a few staff physicians reported using capillary refill time on every patient. In addition, although this study shows that the majority of survey responders stated that they used capillary refill time frequently, we observed no consistent response in how they performed and interpreted capillary refill time. Given that the use of this simple, noninvasive clinical test is supported by many pediatric organizations and pediatricians, the results of this study emphasize the need to examine why this test is inconsistently performed by healthcare providers so as to ensure its reliable performance in the future.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".