A Brief Overview

Overview

Our Mission is to reduce child and youth mortality and morbidity resulting from severe illness or trauma.

The EIIC focuses on accelerating improvements in quality of care and outcomes for children who are in need of urgent or emergency care through an infrastructure that ensures routine, integrated coordination of quality improvement activities between key stakeholder organizations and their champions. Through its efforts, the EIIC hopes to demonstrate how leveraging quality improvement science, the experiential knowledge at Texas Children's Hospital (TCH) and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), and the expertise of multiple professional societies and federal organizations, can improve and transform health care outcomes for children in the United States.

The majority of the nation's children are treated in community and rural emergency departments (EDs) rather than specialized centers such as large children's hospitals. Pediatric visits make up less than 20% of cases at these EDs. As a result, the quality of pediatric emergency care--such as the availability of pediatric-specific equipment, supplies, medications and properly trained emergency personnel,--falls below established practice guidelines.

To that end, EMSC funds and supports improvements in pediatric emergency care in each state and territory through competitive grants or cooperative agreements.

The Emergency Medical Services for Children (EMSC) Innovation and Improvement Center (EIIC), along with the National EMSC Data Analysis Resource Center (NEDARC) is a centralized national resource center for all EMSC grantees and collaborators. We provide guidance, education and tools necessary to increase pediatric readiness of the nation's EMS systems.

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Focus Areas

The EMSC EIIC breaks the large continuum of pediatric care into specialized focus areas or domains:

  • Disaster Planning: The disaster planning domain offers a variety of tools and resources to facilitate disaster preparedness planning by healthcare providers, public health departments, schools, and families and caregivers.

  • Trauma: Traumatic injuries is among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in children. Our trauma domain identifies and disseminates best practices and pediatric trauma care guidelines as well as supports the research and development of new evidence-based guidelines.

  • Prehospital Care: This focus area covers pediatric care from education and prevention to incident recognition, treatment at an emergency scene and transport to an emergency department. The major emphasis of this focus area is the establishment and support of Prehospital Pediatric Emergency Care Coordinators (PECC).

  • Hospital Based Care: The efforts of our hospital-based care focus area are centered around our National Pediatric Readiness Program which seeks to ensure that all U.S. emergency departments have the essential guidelines and resources in place to provide effective emergency care to children.

EMSC Funded Programs

EMSC funds and supports improvements in pediatric emergency care in every state and territory through competitive demonstration grants or cooperative agreements to state governments and accredited schools of medicine.

The four main programs in EMSC are:

All current and historical EMSC grants are searchable in our grants database. Click here to access the database.

QI Collaboratives

The EMSC Innovation and Improvement Center is spearheading a QI collaborative to assist state programs in accelerating their progress in improving the pediatric readiness of EDs and to develop a program to recognize EDs in their state that are ready to care for children with medical emergencies. State improvement teams will benefit by interacting with experts in both pediatric readiness and facility recognition, as well as a care of QI specialists.

The three main collaborative in EMSC are:

Education and Resources

We are committed to providing EMSC grantees with training and consultation specific to managing their grant, achieving the EMSC performance measures, and identifying resources and partners to help implement grant activities. Our training and consultation is accomplished through conference calls and webinars, annual meetings, the Pulse newsletter, and through the development and dissemination of toolkits, podcasts, online training, and other resources.

News & Events

Announcement

We Stand in Solidarity

  • The EMS for Children Innovation and Improvement Center stands in solidarity with our stakeholders and partner organizations including ACEP, AAP, ACS and others against racism, …
Announcement

Establishment of the National Advisory Committee on Children and Disasters (NACCD)

  • Today, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published the Federal Register Notice and …
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Pediatric Readiness Quality Collaborative (PRQC)

The EMSC Innovation and Improvement Center spearheads a Pediatric Readiness Quality Collaborative to assist state programs in accelerating their progress in improving the pediatric readiness of EDs through new interventions. A Train-the-Trainer model will be used to provide regional networks with tools to improve pediatric readiness. Twenty teams composed of training and affiliate sites will be guided to develop local quality improvement efforts to foster pediatric readiness. The project was launched in January 2018.

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Pediatric Emergency Care Coordinator Learning Collaborative

The purpose of this Pediatric Emergency Care Coordinator Learning Collaborative (PECCLC) is to form a cohort of EMSC State Partnership Grant recipients to participate in a Learning Collaborative that will demonstrate effective, replicable strategies to increase the number of local EMS agencies with a PECC. Results from this project will inform and advance efforts with all 58 EMSC state partnership recipient sites to increase adoption of PECC within local EMS agencies.

Focus Areas

Disaster Planning

The EIIC Disaster Domain seeks to support EMSC grantees and stakeholders to better prepare for disasters in a way that takes the specific needs of children into consideration. It offers a variety of resources and tools to facilitate disaster preparedness activities by healthcare providers, public health departments, schools, and family and caregivers.

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Trauma

Traumatic injuries continue to be a major cause of mortality and morbidity in children. The EMSC Program’s goal to reduce pediatric mortality and morbidity from illness and trauma provides the EIIC opportunities, within the continuum of trauma care, to support and influence quality of care rendered and improve outcomes of injured children while simultaneously impacting the EMSC Program goal.

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Prehospital Based Care

There are many issues of national priority within the EMS community that while not age specific are very relevant to children of varying ages. Some of these issues include injury prevention, community paramedicine and human trafficking.

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Hospital Based Care

Much of the Hospital Based Care work carried out at the EIIC is currently focused on the National Pediatric Readiness Project and Quality Improvement Collaboratives. Data from the 2013/2014 Pediatric Readiness Survey helped identify four major opportunities to improve the delivery of pediatric care in emergency departments.

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Research

Focusing on pediatric emergency care, the EIIC Research Domain seeks to create knowledge and accelerate its journey to implementation; it supports EMSC grantees through technical assistance, education, and quality improvement collaboratives.

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Quality Improvement Science

As HRSA moves to a model that is more focused on outcome and quality improvement, it is important that improvement can be demonstrated. Standardized performance measures are one method of ensuring that data collection and monitoring are completed in the same manner allowing comparison across organizations and over time.

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