Nemours Joins Federally-Funded Pediatric Research Network

Wilmington, DE — The Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children’s Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine received federal funding to join the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN). PECARN is the first federally-funded pediatric emergency medicine research network in the United States dedicated to the prevention and management of acute illnesses and injuries in children and youth of all ages.

PECARN is organized around six research "nodes," each with three affiliated Pediatric Emergency Departments (PED), making the duPont Hospital for Children’s Division of Emergency Medicine one of only 18 PECARN PED's in the U.S. Delaware’s duPont Hospital for Children joins Pennsylvania’s Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and Hasbro Children’s Hospital, Providence, RI, to form the “PRIDENT” node. Through this grant, the PRIDENT node will receive $630,000 in annual funding.

“The significance of PECARN's work lies in the fact that many important problems in pediatrics are difficult to answer because they occur infrequently,” explains principal investigator Jonathan Bennett, MD, Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine, duPont Hospital for Children. “Multicenter studies allow us to enroll enough patients and thoroughly investigate these problems. It is a tremendous honor and a great opportunity, for our department to join this network, which is doing groundbreaking research.”

To date, PECARN has produced 33 research publications and 68 presentations at national scientific meetings.  PECARN researchers have done seminal work in the areas of head and spine injuries, cardiac arrest, status epilepticus (repeated or prolonged seizures), asthma and other respiratory illnesses, psychiatric emergencies, and quality and safety improvement in Pediatric Emergency Departments. 

PECARN was founded in 2001 through a grant from the Emergency Medical Services for Children (EMSC), a branch of the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB).