EMS for Children: Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN)

of children in all phases of care.  The research will contribute to the pediatric health care delivery knowledge base and the findings will be especially important in health care settings where pediatric expertise may be limited. Six funded PECARN cooperative agreements and a separately funded data center comprise the PECARN network.  More information on PECARN can be found at http://www.pecarn.org.  Specific information about the requirements of the applicant is included in Section IV (2.ii) ¿Program Narrative.¿ The goal of this network is to conduct meaningful and rigorous multi-institutional research into the treatment and management of acute illnesses and injuries in children and youth across the continuum of emergency medical health care.  This infrastructure helps to overcome present challenges in accessing enough pediatric patients to assess efficacy, effectiveness and quality of care from the relatively small number of pediatric emergency events.  The impact of the PECARN will be improved pediatric emergency and pre-hospital care for children, improved systems of care, and decreased morbidity and mortality among children in the acute care setting.  In this cooperative agreement, award recipients will be required to identify Emergency Department (ED) sites and an EMS affiliate as collaborators in their research node to expand the scope of the Network and demonstrate the feasibility of conducting research in prehospital/ EMS settings.  The applicant must submit two pilot research project proposals with one to include the EMS affiliate and discuss the potential for feasible collaboration with that affiliate. The objectives of this award are to:  1)      Support a network infrastructure to conduct high priority, high impact EMSC research using rigorous study design and methodologies that can be applied to multi-site ED and/or prehospital emergency settings; 2)      Contribute to an organizational structure that ensures network efficiency, productivity, and fidelity of study implementation and includes the ability to: a)      Develop study projects; b)      Attain extramural funding; c)      Conduct multi-site clinical investigations; d)     Publish and disseminate results; and e)      Develop young investigators in the area of pediatric emergency medicine; 3)      Facilitate translation of research results to EMSC practices; and 4)      Foster collaboration among EMS personnel, nurses, practitioners and researchers.