The Kids Pain Collaborative: A collaborative implementation study of acute paediatric pain care in an outer metropolitan, mixed emergency department

Although pain is the most common reason for children to come to the emergency department (ED), it is frequently under-treated and under-recognised. We know children are particularly vulnerable to inadequate pain care, relying on adults to interpret their pain and act as advocates. A recent audit of children presenting in pain at Redcliffe ED found that many children with broken arms waited for prolonged periods (48 – 174 minutes) for pain medicine. The Redcliffe ED team identified significant barriers to pain care: staff’s inability to identify pain in children, lack of parental/clinician advocacy and lack of knowledge around paediatric medicines. To address this deficit in pain care, the Kids Pain Collaborative (KPC), an interdisciplinary collaboration of experienced ED clinicians, academic nurse researchers and ED consumers, has been established to transform paediatric pain care in Redcliffe ED.

The KPC is committed to optimising ED pain care at the systems level so that no child has to wait in pain. Our aim is to co-design, implement and evaluate an innovative evidence-based model of paediatric pain care which will begin with the child and family at triage. Engaging families in pain care assessment, optimising pain care processes and facilitating a workplace culture of prioritising pain is key to the success of this project. This project aims to reduce suffering for children and their families and inform paediatric pain care practice and policy at a State level. Research design draws on recent successful implementation research undertaken at the Queensland Children’s Hospital ED (1).

Can interactive online learning using enhanced technology adequately teach trauma-based procedural skills to emergency nursing clinicians?

Injury and trauma are common presentations to Queensland Emergency Departments. Clinicians caring for trauma victims must maintain competency with trauma procedures and interventions to apply them in a time-critical context, accurately, and therefore achieve the best outcome for individual patients. Engagement with traditional educational approaches, such as face-to-face training, is challenged by workload, shift patterns, clinician location and lack of opportunity to attend dedicated training events. A previous learning needs analysis of trauma education programs has highlighted that the greatest challenges are often faced by clinicians in rural and remote locations. One solution is to include the use of online learning platforms, to connect and assess clinician knowledge, with positive feedback regarding the engagement and experience for the learner. This study aims to use high-fidelity interactive online education, using a range of technologies including 360 videos with user interaction capabilities to design and develop a scalable model for future-proofing trauma education across Queensland. The research will test the effectiveness of (1) the approach to design and development in terms of scalability and (2) the online resources and assessment procedures in terms of the impact on knowledge and skill development.

Point of care lactate testing for the earlier recognition, antimicrobial administration, and definitive management of Paediatric Sepsis in the Emergency Department

This research project will examine the impact of implementing a point of care lactate machine on the earlier administration of antibiotics in paediatric patients diagnosed with sepsis in the Emergency Department. Elevated lactate levels have been shown to be an accurate prognostic factor in predicting morbidities among patients with sepsis. Current practice requires serum lactate samples collected via intravenous cannulation, a task that is both time consuming and challenging for paediatric patients and clinicians. The point of care lactate machine is a portable, single operator handheld device, requiring finger-prick blood sample to obtain an accurate lactate result. This negates the need for intravenous cannulation to obtain objective data to aid clinical decision making. This may result in the earlier recognition of sepsis, administration of antibiotics and transfer to definitive care.

Applications of a novel neurosurgical service accessibility index to improve emergency care of people sustaining a road trauma-related traumatic brain injury in Queensland

Queensland’s dispersed population poses significant challenges to emergency trauma system design, requiring both road and aeromedical retrieval services, trauma outreach services and specialist transfer protocols for time critical injuries to maximise survival.

Road trauma is one of the main mechanisms causing traumatic brain injury (TBI). Pinpointing geographic regions with significant disadvantage for timely access to neurosurgical services is needed for targeting education, treatment and outreach services to Queensland regions most in need.

The Injury Treatment and Rehabilitation Accessibility Queensland Index (iTRAQI) is a tool being developed by this team, and piloted for TBI. iTRAQI maps aeromedical/road transport access routes and uses travel time to acute neurosurgical and rehabilitation services to rank accessibility among Queensland localities under realistic scenarios.

This project will map actual pathways to definitive neurosurgical care for moderate-to-severe road trauma-related TBI and compare them to modelled iTRAQI pathways using linked prehospital, emergency, hospitalisation and compensation data.

From Big Data to the Bedside: answering big questions in emergency department pain care using artificial intelligence and patient-reported outcomes

One of the main reasons that acute pain is not well treated in the emergency department (ED) setting is that pain is difficult to measure. While patient-reported outcome measures (PROMS) are commonly used to help guide treatment of pain in settings such as chronic pain care, cancer care and migraine care, there are no similar tools available for patients with acute pain in the ED. Further hampering efforts to provide better ED pain care is poor overall understanding of the numbers and types of patients that experience pain.

Since it is a symptom rather than a diagnosis, information about pain is not systematically collected and is often obscured within free-text clinical notes. The lack of readily-available data makes it difficult to determine who exactly has experienced pain, and to design research studies to evaluate new and existing treatments.

Researchers aim to validate a PROM for pain care in the ED by administering to 400 patients who present with pain to one of two large hospital EDs. The aim is to find out the incidence and characteristics of patients who present with pain to the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital ED, by using novel machine- and deep-learning techniques to process free-text information from clinical notes. This study will provide new knowledge and techniques that are essential for clinician-researchers to design and conduct studies that will ultimately improve pain care in the ED.

PaNURAMA Inter-facility Transfer Tool: a validation study of the Paediatric Non-Urgent, Risk Assessment, Management and nurse escort Assessment Tool for safe children’s inter-facility Transfer

Most paediatric inter-facility transfers within Australia are for children that do not qualify for specialist paediatric retrieval services but still require access to specialised paediatric care not offered at the local healthcare facility.

Evidence-based transfer guidance for children requiring retrieval are well established. However, for children who do not meet retrieval criteria, there is little guidance for referring and accepting clinicians on how to coordinate safe transfer. Nurse escorts are often deployed but may not be trained sufficiently to deal with arising complications during transfer. Additionally, with the availability and scope of paramedics, the deployment of nurse escorts may not be required, and unecessarily deplete valuable resources at referring facilities.

A risk stratification tool has been developed to determine which non-urgent transfers require higher level consultation and management prior to and during transfer, and nursing escort. The validation of this tool may assist to accurately identify higher-risk children, enabling application of appropriate safeguards, an appropriate level of consultation and escort, and supporting clinician decision-making surrounding transport Australia-wide.

Modelling emergency department patient flow under normal operating conditions and in a pandemic

Patient flow in emergency departments (ED) is impeded when the number of patients exceed physical and/or staffing capacity. This is often referred to as crowding, and is common problem for EDs across the country, adversely impacting patients, staff and the healthcare system.

While many strategies have been reported and trialled to mitigate the consequences of crowding and address its causes, there is no one solution that fits all EDs.

Researchers propose to develop and test a computer model to mimic the ED, simulating patient flow to provide forecasts that can inform policy makers. This is especially important in periods of anticipated high demand for emergency services such as in the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Emergency doctors will team-up with academic researchers to model patient flow in the emergency department to consider operational changes and provide knowledge to guide decision-making for improvement strategies that will lead to faster, more effective patient care, better outcomes and more effective, economical choices.

This innovative collaboration between doctors and university researchers aims to solve real-life system-level problems affecting patient care. The research will generate practical outcomes that improve clinical practice at a system level so that we can better care for our patients.

Providing a safe and efficient method of chest pain assessment

In this project we will evaluate a new pathway for assessing chest pain in the emergency department. The pathway is designed to reduce the costs of managing patients at low-risk of heart attack without compromising patient safety. The cost savings are estimated to be around $95 million if implemented Australia-wide, with the bulk of the cost reduction being through decreased length of stay in the emergency department.

The new pathway will be implemented at three Queensland hospitals. Data collected before and after the implementation of this pathway will be used to assess 1) whether it results in a shorter length of stay in hospital, 2) whether it is safe for identifying heart attack, and 3) whether it reduces healthcare utilisation and healthcare costs.
Over 450,000 patients present to an Australian emergency department with chest pain every year. The current approach to rule out heart attack for these patients is lengthy and costly, taking up to 26 hours at a cost of $2,127 per patient.

Valuing patients’ experience in the emergency department

Improving patient experiences is part of Queensland’s 2016-2020 Strategic Plan to enable safe, quality healthcare services. Yet, current emergency department(ED) patient experience measures, including the burdensome 82-item Queensland Health (QH) ED patient experience survey, fail to reflect patient preferences for care experiences, inhibiting the design and evaluation of healthcare services that reflect patient preferences, and the delivery of value-based healthcare.

The aim of this project is to develop an ED patient experience classification system and accompanying scoring algorithm that can be used to both measure and value patient experiences in Queensland EDs. It will provide a proof of concept for an Australia-wide development, valuation and knowledge transfer study.

Junior doctors at triage improve patient flow in the ED

Introducing a novel model of care to the emergency department may provide significant reductions in key performance indicators, such as patient length of stay, or the National Emergency Access Target (NEAT).

In previous studies, researchers have found that rostering a physician to work at triage can lead to significant improvements on a range of metrics, including time to treatment, patient length of stay and rate of patients who left before receiving treatment. However, in a regional hospital where staffing numbers and budgets are under pressure this model may not be possible.

The objective of this study is to implement a novel model of care at triage in the Hervey Bay Hospital Emergency Department. For a trial period of three months, junior doctors (PHO/registrar level) will be rostered to work at triage on alternate day shifts. A range of outcome measures will be compared with day shifts when junior doctors are not rostered at triage. This model may be relevant for other regional emergency departments.