Who should get pediatric intensive care when not all can? A call for international guidelines on allocation of pediatric intensive care resources

摘要

The facts are as follows: PICU services improve outcomes of critically ill children (1-3). Worldwide, many children who die have no access to PICUs (4, 5). The decision to admit a child to the PICU is not based on any uniformly accepted and applied criteria. When there are sufficient PICU beds, strict criteria are not necessary. However, limited beds and crisis standards of care which becomes a reality in the developed world only during pandemics and natural disasters is a daily reality for many of our colleagues worldwide including the PICU at Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital (RCWMCH) (6, 7). In this issue of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, Argent et al (8) discuss that some innovative ideas and solutions are therefore needed to guide allocation of these scarce resources.