Grace Hsiung

Regionalization of Pediatric Surgery: Trends Already Underway

Introduction:This study aims to characterize the delivery of pediatric surgical care based on hospital volume stratified by disease severity, geography, and specialty. Longitudinal regionalization over the 10-year study period is noted and further explored. Methods:The Kids’ Inpatient Database (KID) was queried from 2000 to 2009 for patients <18 years undergoing noncardiac surgery. Hospitals nationwide were grouped into commutable regions and identified as high-volume centers (HVCs) if they had more than 1000 weighted procedures per year. Regions that had at least one HVC and one or more additional lower volume center were included for analysis. Low-risk, high-risk neonatal, and surgical subspecialties were analyzed separately. Results:A total of 385,242 weighted pediatric surgical admissions in 33 geographical regions and 224 hospitals were analyzed. Overall, HVCs comprised 33 (14.7%) hospitals, medium-volume center (MVC) 33 (14.7%), and low-volume center (LVC) 158 (70.5%). The four low-risk procedures analyzed were increasingly regionalized: appendectomy (52% in HVCs in 2000 to 60% in 2009, P < 0.001), fracture reduction (63% to 68%, P < 0.001), cholecystectomy (54% to 63%, P < 0.001), and pyloromyotomy (65% to 85%, P < 0.001). Neonatal surgery showed significant regionalization trends for tracheoesophageal fistula (66% to 87%, P < 0.001) and gastroschisis (76% to 89%, P < 0.001). Conclusions:This is the first large-scale, multi-region analysis to demonstrate that pediatric surgical care has transitioned to HVCs over a recent decade, particularly for low-risk patients. It is important for practitioners and policymakers alike to understand such volume trends in order to ensure hospital capacity while maintaining an optimal quality of care.

Advances in Pediatric Surgical Education: A Critical Appraisal of Two Consecutive Minimally Invasive Pediatric Surgery Training Courses

BACKGROUND Mandates for improved patient safety and increasing work hour restrictions have resulted in changes in surgical education. Educational courses increasingly must meet those needs. We sought to determine the experience, skill level, and the impact of simulation-based education (SBE) on two cohorts of pediatric surgery trainees. MATERIALS AND METHODS After Institutional Review Board (IRB) exempt determination, a retrospective review was performed of evaluations for an annual advanced minimally invasive surgery (MIS) course over 2 consecutive years. The courses included didactic content and hands-on skills training. Simulation included neonatal/infant models for rigid bronchoscopy-airway foreign body retrieval, laparoscopic common bile duct exploration, and real tissue diaphragmatic hernia (DH), duodenal atresia (DA), pulmonary lobectomy, and tracheoesophageal fistula models. Categorical data were analyzed with chi-squared analyses with t-tests for continuous data. RESULTS Participants had limited prior advanced neonatal MIS experience, with 1.95 ± 2.84 and 1.16 ± 1.54 prior cases in the 2014 and 2015 cohorts, respectively. The 2015 cohort had significantly less previous experience in lobectomy (P = .04) and overall advanced MIS (P = .007). Before both courses, a significant percentage of participants were not comfortable with DH repair (39%-42%), DA repair (50%-74%), lobectomy (34%-43%), and tracheoesophageal fistula repair (54%-81%). After course completion, > 60% of participants reported improvement in comfort with procedures and over 90% reported that the course significantly improved their perceived ability to perform each operation safely. CONCLUSION Pediatric surgery trainees continue to have limited exposure to advanced MIS during clinical training. SBE results in significant improvement in both cognitive knowledge and trainee comfort with safe operative techniques for advanced MIS.

Improving surgical care for children through multicenter registries and QI collaboratives

The role of the healthcare organization is shifting and must overcome the challenges of fragmented, costly care, and lack of evidence in practice, to reduce cost, ensure quality, and deliver high-value care. Notable gaps exist within the expected quality and delivery of pediatric healthcare, necessitating a change in the role of the healthcare organization. To realize these goals, the use of collaborative networks that leverage massive datasets to provide information for the development of learning healthcare systems will become increasingly necessary as efforts are made to narrow the gap in healthcare quality for children. By building upon the lessons learned from early collaborative efforts and other industries, operationalizing new technologies, encouraging clinical-community partnerships, and improving performance through transparent pursuit of meaningful goals, pediatric surgery can increase the adoption of best practices by developing collaborative networks that provide evidence-based clinical decision support and accelerate progress toward a new culture of delivering high-quality, high-value, and evidenced-based pediatric surgical care.

Financing pediatric surgery in low-, and middle-income countries

Congenital anomalies once considered fatal, are now surgically correctable conditions that now allow children to live a normal life. Pediatric surgery, traditionally thought of as a privilege of the rich, as being too expensive and impractical, and which has previously been overlooked and excluded in resource-poor settings, is now being reexamined as a cost-effective strategy to reduce the global burden of disease-particularly in low, and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, to date, global pediatric surgical financing suffers from an alarming paucity of data. To leverage valuable resources and prioritize pediatric surgical services, timely, accurate and detailed global health spending and financing for pediatric surgical care is needed to inform policy making, strategic health-sector budgeting and resource allocation. This discussions aims to characterize and highlight the evidence gaps that currently exist in global financing and funding flow for pediatric surgical care in LMICs.

Using accelerometers to characterize recovery after surgery in children

BACKGROUND Assessment of recovery after surgery in children remains highly subjective. However, advances in wearable technology present an opportunity for clinicians to have an objective assessment of postoperative recovery. The aims of this pilot study are to: (1) evaluate acceptability of accelerometer use in pediatric surgical patients, (2) use accelerometer data to characterize the recovery trajectory of physical activity, and (3) determine if postoperative adverse events are associated with a decrease in physical activity. STUDY DESIGN Children aged 3-18-years-old undergoing elective inpatient and outpatient surgical procedures were invited to participate. Physical activity was measured using an Actigraph GT3X wristworn accelerometer for ≥2days preoperatively and 5-14days postoperatively. Time spent performing light (LPA) and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) was expressed in minutes/day. Physical activity for each postoperative day was calculated as a percentage of preoperative activity, and recovery trajectories were produced. Adverse events were reported and mapped against recovery trajectories. RESULTS Of 60 patients enrolled, 25 (10 inpatients, 15 outpatients) completed the study procedures and were included in the analysis. For outpatient procedures, LPA recovered to preoperative level on postoperative day (POD) 7 and MVPA peaked at 90% on POD 8. For inpatient procedures, LPA peaked at 70% on POD 11, and MVPA peaked at 53% on POD 10. Adverse events in 2 patients were associated with a decline in activity. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates that objective monitoring of postoperative physical activity using accelerometers is feasible in the pediatric surgical population. Recovery trajectories for inpatient and outpatient procedures differ. Accelerometer technology presents clinicians with a new potential tool for assessing and managing surgical recovery, and for determining if children are not recovering as expected. TYPE OF STUDY Diagnostic Study. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE III.

Surveillance and data capture to assess trauma care capacity in low-and middle-income countries

WecommendStewartetal1on their article regarding their longitudinal capacity assessment of the progress in trauma service availability during the last decade inGhana and their recognition of the need for expanding the evidence base for trauma care capacity in lowand middle-income countries. The successes in improving in-hospital capacity such as infrastructure (eg, blood bank), equipment (eg, chest tubes,ventilator), andservices (eg, skin grafting, neurosurgery) are part of broader needed efforts for capacity development of a complex, multicomponent, interconnected, and evolving trauma care delivery system. Remaining gaps in process evaluation (eg, prevention, prehospital triage,mobile emergency services, definitivehospital care, workforce distribution, long-term rehabilitation, transfer protocols and criteria, communication, and workflow) as well as injury and outcome surveillance present ongoing opportunities for collaboration and building to overcome present barriers in the delivery of trauma care. These summative factors arenecessary components for accurate and reliable appraisal of a country’s trauma care capacity. Moreover, the implementation of a formal injury surveillance mechanismwould enable the collectionof reliable injurydata for problem assessment and determination of whether advances have been made regarding quality and process improvement. Establishing monitoring mechanisms that provide country-specific injury andoutcomedatawill enable the accurate characterization of persistent deficits in trauma care capacity that may then more effectively inform policy making. Therefore, adoption of a systems-based approach and a broadening of the context-specific knowledgebase are essential to trauma care capacity development. In short, we need timely, accurate, and available data on the occurrence of injuries and related deaths; once these data have been collected and outcomes have been reviewed, steps can bemade toward applied data2—targeted, sustainable, and costeffective strengthening of trauma care services in already resource-poor settings. A recent study demonstrating a largely unchanged preponderance of prehospital deaths (76%) in Ghana compared with adecadeearlier (80%)3 seems tounderscore the conceivable impact that prioritizationof strategic interventions at the level of prehospital triage and transport could have. As other sectors such as maternal and child health recognize the need for such monitoring and evaluation, even as part of the MillenniumDevelopment Goal Acceleration Framework,4 hopefully lessons learned can be transferred and applied to Ghana’s trauma care system.