Chris DeRienzo, MD, chief physician executive for the American Hospital Association, released a letter in response to a Wall Street Journal article critical of hospital preparedness to treat pediatric patients.
The Journal investigation found that only 14 percent of emergency departments nationwide are certified as ready to treat children or are children's hospitals designed to care for young people. They also created a comprehensive list of the percentage of hospitals in each state with emergency departments deemed prepared for pediatric patients.
"The truth is as simple as this: Hospitals and the caregivers inside them are committed to providing safe and high-quality care for kids and our EDs are prepared to treat them," Dr. DeRienzo, a pediatrician and neonatologist, wrote in the letter. "You don't have to be a doctor to realize that comparing a rural stand-alone ED to a dedicated children's ED at a state-of-the-art children's hospital is not just flawed but unfair. Simply put, labeling any center that doesn't match all the services offered at the most state-of-the-art providers as 'unprepared for children' is nonsensical at best, and dangerous at worst."
Dr. DeRienzo said that the Journal investigation misrepresented three points in its article and provided the following clarification:
- Pediatric training is "a core aspect of training and board certification for both emergency medicine and family medicine physicians."
- Emergency departments are designed to screen, stabilize and either treat or transfer patients. The mix of transfer versus treat varies across departments and specialties, including for pediatrics.
- Healthcare professionals understand that highly acute pediatric emergencies require high-level specialty care. Although many senior specialists work at children's hospitals, specialists can also be found in other hospitals. Many children's hospitals invest in regionalized approaches to extend their reach and rotate specialists through critical access hospitals or rural areas to provide the care needed.
"Let's be clear — America's hospitals and health systems are committed to continually improving the care we provide for our communities, and that includes caring for kids," Dr. DeRienzo wrote. "Implying that hundreds of thousands of health care professionals working in our EDs — many of them parents themselves — don't care about treating kids is just wrong. Even worse, arguing they don't prioritize that care because treating children makes less money is insulting."