COLUMBUS, Ohio – The Emergency Medicine department at Nationwide Children’s Hospital recently received a four-year, $2.8 million grant to continue leading one of the six U.S. Research Node Centers for the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN), the first federally-funded pediatric emergency medicine research network.
Rachel Stanley, MD, MHSA, chief of Emergency Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, leads the Great Lakes node center as the principal investigator, which in addition to Nationwide Children’s, includes the University of Michigan and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.
“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,” said Dr. Stanley, also an associate professor at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.
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.
About PECARN
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 and youth across the continuum of emergency medicine health care. The network is comprised of 18 hospital emergency departments that care for more than 1 million injured and ill children every year and more than nine partner EMS agencies. 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 just one emergency department because they occur so infrequently. PECARN provides the expertise and infrastructure to scientifically study the best treatments for children in emergency situations.
About the Great Lakes EMSC Research Network
The Great Lakes EMSC Research Network is one of six research networks and one prehospital research network funded nationwide. The other five networks funded are the Hospitals of the Midwest Emergency Research Node, centered at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; the Pediatric Emergency Medicine Northeast, West & South, centered at Columbia University in New York City; the Pediatric Research in Injuries and Medical Emergencies, centered at the University of California, Davis Medical Center; and the newly created nodes San Fran-Oakland-Providence, Atlanta Research Collaborative, centered at Hasbro Children’s Hospital and includes Emory University and the University of California, San Francisco. Also the newly created West/SE Pediatric Emergency Medicine Research, centered at Seattle Children’s and includes the University of California, Los Angeles and Children’s Medical Center Dallas. The Charlotte, Houston and Milwaukee Prehospital Node is the prehospital node within the network. More information is available at www.pecarn.org.