The Emergency Medicine Department at Nationwide Children’s Hospital received a $2.4 million grant to lead one of six US Research Node Centers for the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN). The grant is awarded by the Emergency Medical Services for Children (EMSC) Program administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau.
Rachel Stanley, MD, division chief of Emergency Medicine at Nationwide Children’s and associate professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University, will lead the Great Lakes node center which includes Children’s Hospital of Michigan and the University of Michigan in addition to Nationwide Children’s. Dr. Stanley also currently chairs the PECARN Steering Committee.
PECARN, founded in 2001, is the nation’s first federally-funded pediatric research network dedicated to research about the prevention and management of acute illnesses and injuries in children across the continuum of emergency medicine health care.
PECARN is comprised of 18 hospital emergency departments that care for more than one million injured and ill children every year. These emergency departments represent academic, community, urban, rural, general and children’s hospitals.
Pediatric illnesses and injuries such as traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest or life threatening seizures can be difficult to research at a single emergency department because they occur so infrequently. PECARN provides the expertise, infrastructure and larger patient populations to scientifically study the best treatments for children in emergency situations.
“Nationwide Children’s participation in PECARN allows us to improve care for our patients by bringing cutting-edge research and treatments to some of our most critically ill and injured children,” says Dr Stanley.
The Great Lakes EMSC Research Network is one of six research networks funded across the nation. The other five networks are the Hospitals of the Midwest Emergency Research Node (HOMERUN) led by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; the Pediatric Emergency Medicine Northeast, West, & South (PEM-NEWS), led by Columbia University in New York City; the Pediatric Research in Injuries and Medical Emergencies (PRIME), led by the University of California, Davis Medical Center; the Washington, Boston, Chicago Applied Research Node (WBCARN) led by Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC; and the newly created Southwest Research Node Center (SW-RNC), led by the University of Arizona.