The mission of the Critical Care Division is to improve health outcomes of children born to military personnel and those impacted by armed conflict, and to identify the moral injury associated with providing care to critically-ill children. The Critical Care division coordinates a robust and productive clinical research program with faculty collaboration from other departments at USU as well as other military and civilian academic health centers.
ABOUT
Pediatric combat casualties have become a common occurrence in post-911 conflicts, with pediatric mortality far exceeding that of adult casualties. The goals of the Pediatric Critical Care Section are to further investigate the reasons for increased mortality in this age group, assess non-pediatric trained providers comfort caring for pediatric casualties - including the need for additional training, improve access to evidence-based clinical practice guidelines at deployed MTFs, and use novel simulation strategies to assess and educate medical providers on the most common fatal injury patterns seen in pediatric combat casualties.
The goals of the Pediatric Critical Care Division are to:
- Describe the injury patterns sustained by children impacted by armed conflict and;
- Identify illness scripts for survivors and non-survivors;
- Identify the training and resource needs of military providers caring for children in resource limited environments and;
- Develop clinical practice guidelines and educational curriculum for pediatric trauma resuscitation;
- Understand the moral injury sustained by military providers caring for children injured in armed conflict.
The research activity of the Pediatric Critical Care Division is concentrated on the following projects:
- Retrospective review of pediatric encounters from the Joint Trauma System DoDTR database;
- Needs assessment survey of recently deployed DoD providers that have provided care for pediatric casualties;
- Create a novel pediatric trauma and humanitarian clinical practice guideline;
- Qualitative analysis of students' experience with pediatric death in a simulated mass casualty exercise.
Collaboration with institutional and national research partners to expand lessons learned within the military experience and how it translates to the civilian environment. Efforts are focused on dissemination of knowledge and editorial activities in peer-reviewed medical journals.