In England and Wales, more children are being admitted to intensive care units but there arn't enough staff per bed to cope with these increasing numbers, a new study finds.
The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Leeds. For the study, researchers looked at details of nearly 134,000 admissions to English and Welsh units, of children aged between 0 and 15 years over the period 2004 to 2013 from the Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet). The report suggested a 15 percent increase in hospital admissions over the 10-year period. Reserachers also found a 4 percent increase in such admissions, but these were not due to changes in childhood population.
"Pediatric intensive care units continue to have difficulty achieving the Paediatric Intensive Care Society standards for nursing care," Professor Liz Draper from the University of Leicester said in a press statement. "Over time, the complexity of care that some of these children have required has increased, yet staffing levels have not risen to meet this need. A large number of cases require more than one nurse to attend to a child in a pediatrics intensive care bed, so there is still great pressure on these nursing staff to deliver under often very difficult conditions."
Dr Roger Parslow, from the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds, added: "With this long-term dataset, we are able to examine trends in outcomes, interventions and patient profiles. This enables effective planning for the future as well as providing the kind of data doctors and researchers need to set up clinical trials to improve the treatments that children receive in pediatrics intensive care."
Dr Michael Marsh, representing the independent PICANet Steering Group, commented: "The last twenty years has brought phenomenal improvements in the outcomes of critically ill children in England and Wales. This is in part due to systematic organization of pediatrics intensive care services and improvements in the quality of care provided. It would be a tragedy to see these improvements compromised by failures to attend to proper staffing of units."
PICANet is commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP), a multi-agency organisation established in April 2008 to promote quality in healthcare, as part of the National Clinical Audit Programme and is run jointly by the University of Leeds and the University of Leicester.
