Perception of Pediatric Readiness Across a Health System\u27s Emergency Departments

The recent pandemic and pediatric respiratory syncytial virus surge have reinvigorated pediatric care readiness conversations. National strategies and associations exist to guide health systems in improving the quality of emergency care offered to pediatric populations by first assessing readiness for care. These research strategies center on survey implementation and staff engagement in general emergency departments with the goal to improve staff readiness to care for pediatric patients that may present for treatment. What impact would developing a consolidated pediatric readiness program that includes: pediatric emergency care coordinator designation for each emergency department, pediatric readiness education and committee engagement have on health system emergency department staff’s perception of pediatric readiness in their hospitals? Evidence strongly supported a multi-faceted implementation plan to address challenges of varied emergency departments and relationship with higher pediatric care center hospital within the health system. Using researched pediatric readiness quality improvement initiatives, a consolidated pediatric readiness program was defined for the health system to include pediatric emergency care coordinator designation for each emergency department, pediatric readiness education, and corporate level pediatric readiness committee structure. Analysis focused on staff perceptions through a quality improvement study method with pre-survey, implementation of quality improvement initiatives across the organization, and post-survey to evaluate system changes. Evaluating emergency departments across a health system provided for varied geographic, patient volume, and other considerations, and results allowed for conversation around pediatric readiness program implementation in other health systems framed by the analysis of emergency department staff perceptions. Implementing a consolidated pediatric readiness program customized to the health system allowed for the opportunity to impact the perception of readiness across the health system

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead