LEARN Project Overview

Given the limited research on pediatric patient safety in emergency medicine, there is a need to develop knowledge to guide effective patient safety activities in order to improve children's emergency medical care services. Pediatrics is a high priority population and patient safety in ambulatory care is a high priority focus. We now have an unexplored opportunity - to adapt a successful engineering methodology for identifying risks to the context of children's emergency medical care. The United States Department of Energy (DOE) employs a standardized methodology of prospective risk assessment to analyze a corpus of risk assessments in order to determine significant generic risks and risk contributors. By adapting these DOE methods and criteria to analyze existing risk assessments from the National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI) member institutions we can provide knowledge about significant risks and risk contributors in children's emergency medical care. These adapted methods can provide us with prioritized risks and risk contributors in children's emergency medical care. Thirty existing risk assessments from NACHRI member institutions will be analyzed for the purposes of this project. The resulting risks and risk contributors in the systems and processes of children's emergency medical care, as well as the adapted methods, will be disseminated through a NACHRI hosted “Webinar”, the NACHRI website and other relevant mechanisms.