Emergency Medicine

With H1N1 and the flu, don’t forget about RSV

Florence Bourgeois, MD, MPH, and colleagues studied children age 7 and younger who came to the Emergency Department (ED) with acute respiratory illnesses from 2001 to 2006. Among their finding, published in last month's Pediatrics:

• Children infected with RSV had more than twice as many ED visits and six time more hospitalizations that those with seasonal flu.
• Parents of children with RSV missed almost three times more workdays than parents of children with seasonal flu.
• Parents of children under age 2 were nearly five times more likely to miss work when their child had RSV versus seasonal flu.
• RSV-related illnesses were twice as likely as seasonal flu to lead to additional clinic visits and antibiotic treatment.

Though this study used data from the pre-H1N1 era, the flu-prevention measures preached here and everywhere -- handwashing, alcohol-based hand sanitizers, staying home when sick -- still apply.

A unique writing experience

Recently, James Mandell, MD, president and CEO, met with Javier Marin, editor of the Spanish-language newspaper El Planeta, to discuss joint efforts between the hospital and the newspaper.

Marin suggested a unique story idea: to have one of his reporters spend the day at Boston Children's Hospital's Emergency Department and write about the experience from a Latino perspective.

Ironically enough, Marin became part of the story when he and his wife spent Thanksgiving Day in the ED with their youngest son, Alejandro.

 At Children’s Hospital Boston, we believe that patients and families deserve to know whether the hospital where they have chosen to receive their care meets the highest standards and is committed to excellence.  Through our Program for Patient Safety and Quality, we continually monitor and improve the care we provide to our patients. Since the diseases and chronic conditions that affect children and adolescents are quite different from those of adults, it is often not appropriate to use adult measures to evaluate the quality of pediatric care.  That’s why we have taken a leadership role in developing scientifically sound methods to measure the quality of care provided to all children and adolescents.

 We aim to solve some of the world’s greatest pediatric health problems. Some ways we do this stem from scientific research: Understanding diseases deeply—even at the cellular or molecular level—leads to new drugs and therapies. Other discoveries arise from moments spent at patients’ bedsides, when doctors and nurses see opportunities to improve care. This approach, which we call “clinical innovations,” often requires us to develop entirely new tools or come up with inventive strategies. This creative form of innovation is the path by which many major improvements in health care have been made.