At the last meeting of the hospitals participating in the AKTIN Emergency Departments Register, the care of children in Emergency Departments took centre stage. Every year, hundreds of thousands of children and adolescents are treated in emergency departments in Germany - often with very specific requirements that differ significantly from adult emergency medicine. The AKTIN emergency admission register is part of the NUM platform for acute, intensive and emergency medicine (AKTIN). This infrastructure is used to continuously collect data in many German hospitals, enabling better quality of care and valuable research.
Of the almost 30 participants at the meeting, more than half were doctors from Emergency Departments across Germany. This shows once again that all clinicians in AKTIN have the opportunity to help shape strategies and developments.
The meeting focussed on three main areas:
- Creating comparability - own benchmarking for paediatric emergency departments: The existing benchmarking for central Emergency Departments (ZNA) will be better adapted to the needs of paediatric emergency care. In future, there will be a separate report for paediatric emergency departments. This will allow hospitals to compare their processes and results in a targeted manner and learn from each other.
- More suitable data for children: The AKTIN data set - the common documentation basis for all participating Emergency Departments - is being expanded. New variables are being added that are especially important for children, for example for age-appropriate recording of patient characteristics or typical diagnostic and procedural forms. This will enable the actual care situation of children to be recorded even more precisely.
- The EDCareKids project: The EDCareKids project, which is funded by the Federal Joint Committee's Innovation Fund, was particularly emphasised. It not only examines the structures of paediatric emergency departments, but also the reality of care: Which children come with which complaints? How long does it take to treat them? Which processes are decisive for quality and safety? EDCareKids makes targeted use of the existing AKTIN infrastructure. This shows how support programmes can be sensibly interlinked: No expensive parallel structures are set up, but existing platforms are strengthened and further developed.
The project participants have already presented the first scientific results. The publication is available here: Springer link.
Why this is important: Children are not small adults. Their emergency care follows its own rules and requires special structures. With the adapted benchmarking, the expansion of the data set and the research work of EDCareKids, decisive foundations are being laid to sustainably improve the care of children in German Emergency Departments.
And the experience gained from AKTIN will be taken even further in the future: in the NUM project RAPID, the concepts of the register will be transferred to intensive care medicine and further developed. Paediatric intensive care medicine is also being considered from the outset. This creates a consistent perspective from emergency to intensive care treatment.