Principal Investigator: Joel Stitzel, PhD, and Andrea Doud, MD, Wake Forest University Childress Institute for Pediatric Trauma

Involvement in motor vehicle crashes remains a leading cause of death and disability in children worldwide. Though there has been a large focus of public awareness on the prevention of such injuries, less attention has been paid to the treatment of childhood injuries when prevention fails. The long-term goal of this project is to create a scoring system to determine the specific crash-related injuries in children that require treatment at designated trauma centers. This information will be used to create an advanced automatic crash notification (AACN) system for pediatric occupants to improve triage. Researchers hypothesize that the need for a child to receive treatment at a designated trauma center depends upon the severity, time sensitivity, and predictability of the injuries the child sustains, which in turn are dependent upon the developmental stage of the child. For this reason, the main objective of Year 2 is to refine the severity, time sensitivity and predictability scores of the particular injuries sustained within each pediatric developmental group, determined during Year 1. Ultimately, researchers aim to create an AACN algorithm that will improve triage and outcomes, including mortality reduction, for pediatric occupants in motor vehicle crashes.

This project is currently underway.