2024 Prehospital Pediatric Readiness Project Assessment Data (Ohio)

Why It Matters:
Pediatric emergencies can be rare but high stakes. Building readiness ensures better outcomes for children and supports EMS clinicians in delivering high-quality care.

Key Highlights

• The 2024 PPRP Assessment was the first opportunity to get a comprehensive picture of EMS readiness for children and improve national understanding of prehospital pediatric care. The results of this assessment serve as a starting point from which we can measure improvement over time.
• Every EMS agency, regardless of their score, should be proud of their participation in this assessment. Participation demonstrates their commitment to children, to high-quality care, and to continuous improvement.
• Creating any single, comprehensive, nationwide assessment is challenging because there is immense variation in EMS systems. Scoring of the assessment, as a result, was also challenging. To better reflect the complexity within EMS systems, data (and scores) are grouped by licensure level (BLS, ILS, ALS).
• No score is a “bad” score. Readiness scores are intended to be a general indicator of capacity to care for children, but all scores have limitations. Scores are useful as a baseline for measurement and can provide benchmarking and context.
• Ultimately, given the immense variation in EMS, agencies should focus less on comparisons and more on their individual agency’s performance. They should focus on identifying what meaningful, practical, and feasible improvement looks like for their agency.
• Agencies should refer to the importance statements in their gap report for context about the questions asked. A document with all importance statements will be available soon.
• The PPRP Toolkit can help agencies as they get started on improvements, and EMSC Program state managers and other partners are here to support agencies along the way.
• Pediatric Readiness is a marathon, not a sprint. An open assessment will be available in the future. When it is, agencies can return to www.emspedsready.org to re-evaluate their performance and continue their improvement journey. During the open assessment, agencies will be able to compare previous scores to current scores.

Key Calls to Action for EMS Agencies:

• Review Your Results: Share and discuss your individual agency’s report with leadership.
• Plan for Improvement: Use the PPRP Toolkit to guide practical steps.
• Reassess Performance: When the open assessment becomes available, return to emspedsready.org to measure progress.
• Collaborate: Partner with nearby agencies for pediatric training or share a PECC (Pediatric Emergency Care Coordinator)

Important Notes About the Data:

• Scores are baseline indicators, not judgments.
• Data is grouped by licensure level (ALS, BLS, ILS) and adjusted for scope of practice.
• Focus on your agency’s performance rather than comparisons. Individual results by agency are available to the respondents only.
• Higher response rates improve representativeness; lower rates may limit comparisons.

Next Steps:
Pediatric readiness is a marathon, not a sprint. Use these insights to guide everyday improvements and revisit progress during future assessments.