Resource Utilization in Children who Receive a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit Consult in the Emergency Department: A Retrospective Cohort Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives To describe the characteristics, critical care resource requirements, and outcomes of children who were hospitalized after a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) consult in the Emergency Department (ED). Methods In this single-centre retrospective cohort study, we conducted chart reviews for children (<18 years) hospitalized following a PICU consult in the ED to examine patient characteristics, timing of consult, ED length of stay, Medical Emergency Team (MET) utilization, PICU nursing workload, and critical care interventions for children who were and were not admitted to the PICU. Results During the one-year study period, 247 PICU consults were performed in the ED resulting in 161 (65.2%) direct admissions to PICU and 1 indirect PICU admission via the ward. Of 105 children with complex chronic conditions, 73 (69.5%) were admitted to PICU, including 32 (91.4%) of 35 children with chronic home ventilatory needs, only 2 (6.2%) of whom received a critical care intervention beyond respiratory support. Within 24 h of hospitalization, 112 (69.1%) of 162 PICU admissions received a critical care-specific intervention. Of 86 (34.8%) ward admissions, 16 (18.6%) were reviewed by the MET. Children admitted to the ward had a significantly longer post-consult ED length of stay than children admitted to PICU (median 428 min vs. 130 min; p <0.0001). Conclusions Over two-thirds of children admitted to PICU from the ED required early critical care interventions, with the remainder potentially benefitting from closer monitoring or a higher frequency of non-critical care interventions than can be reasonably provided on general inpatient wards. More research is needed to evaluate critical care and hospital resource utilization when children are triaged to the ward following a PICU consult in the ED.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".