Advancing Prehospital Pediatric Readiness: Formation and Future Directions of the Prehospital Pediatric Readiness Project

Emergency services leaders have long recognized the importance of timely, high-quality care for critically ill and injured children. The establishment of the federal Emergency Medical Services for Children Program in 1985 has helped disseminate and promote the adoption of pediatric emergency care standards nationwide for the past four decades. Additional efforts were further driven by an impactful report by the Institute of Medicine in 2006: <i>Emergency Care for Children: Growing Pains,</i> which outlined key recommendations to improve pediatric emergency care. In response, the National Pediatric Readiness Project (NPRP) launched in 2011, providing a roadmap for emergency departments to improve pediatric care. Following the success of the NPRP, national organizations collaborated to address pediatric emergency care in the prehospital setting and published a set of recommendations in a 2020 joint policy statement, accompanied by a technical report that summarized the evidence behind the recommendations. Subsequently, the National Prehospital Pediatric Readiness Project (PPRP) was initiated to implement these recommendations. The work of this project has resulted in the development and dissemination of a comprehensive checklist, a corresponding toolkit, and a first-of-its-kind nationwide assessment of prehospital Pediatric Readiness. We describe here the scope of the PPRP, along with a description of future directions, including disseminating assessment results, supporting emergency medical services agency quality improvement efforts, research opportunities, and building a sustainable infrastructure to ensure all emergency medical service agencies are equipped to deliver high-quality emergency care to children.