49 Implementation of a Sensory Toolkit in the Emergency Department for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by deficits in social communication and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests, or activities. Children with ASD frequently visit the emergency department (ED), and present more for primary care-related issues and other non-emergent reasons than children without ASD. Visiting the ED can be challenging and stressful for children with ASD, their caregivers, and the healthcare professionals caring for them. Sensory Toolkits are a collection of sensory items that can help to distract and calm children, including during times of stress. We hypothesized that a Sensory Toolkit will improve the experience of children with ASD and their families in our ED. Objectives The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of a Sensory Toolkit on the experience of children with ASD and their families visiting a tertiary-care hospital ED. Design/Methods After ethical approval was obtained, a pre-implementation survey was conducted on parents of children with ASD about prior experiences in the ED and their interest in a Sensory Toolkit. A Sensory Toolkit specific to children with ASD was developed through literature review and in consultation with families of children with ASD. The Sensory Toolkit, which included a light wand, squeeze ball, push-pop bubble toy, and other items, was launched in a tertiary-care hospital ED in June 2021 with 50 Toolkits. A post-implementation survey was conducted to explore parents’ experiences of their child using the Sensory Toolkit in the ED and to obtain feedback to help improve the Toolkit. Results In the pre-implementation survey, 80% (32/40) of parents felt that a Sensory Toolkit would improve the experience of children with ASD in the ED. Post-implementation, 100% (12/12; response rate ~25% from 50 Toolkits) of parents felt that the Sensory Toolkit was helpful for their child. Parents reported that the Sensory Toolkit was “AMAZING” and “A really great idea, thank you!”. Feedback provided regarding improvements that could be made to the Sensory Toolkit was highly patient-specific and often contradictory. One parent suggested more items to chew on while another parent suggested elimination of the chewable items and one parent loved the light up toy while another suggested to remove it. Conclusion The Sensory Toolkit contributes positively to the experience of children with ASD and their families in a tertiary-care hospital ED. This study will help inform improvement of the Sensory Toolkit in the ED, including consideration of more specialized Sensory Toolkits to meet individual patient needs. Given the success in the ED, the Sensory Toolkit could be expanded into other areas of the tertiary-care hospital and beyond.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".