Parents’ or other carers’ concerns may be a better indicator that a child in hospital is deteriorating than certain traditional early warning signs such as heart rate, breathing rate, or blood pressure, a prospective study has concluded.1
The authors of the Australian study said that parental intuition was a “signal we can’t afford to ignore” and suggested that hospitals should actively seek parents’ and carers’ concerns and incorporate them into hospital systems used to detect deterioration in their paediatric patients.
In the study of children presenting to the emergency department of a tertiary hospital in Melbourne, Australia, from November 2020 to December 2022, care givers were asked a simple question, “Are you worried your child is getting worse?”
After children who had no sets of vital signs recorded after triage were excluded, the study had 73 845 eligible patients, of whom 24 239 (33%) gave at least one documented response to the question.
A total …