• Jennifer Armstrong, Jess Gibson, Katie O'Hearn, Dori-Ann Martin, Maysaa Assaf, and Kusum Menon.
• Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
• Pediatr Crit Care Me. 2024 Sep 1; 25 (9): e380e384e380-e384.

ObjectivesTo identify the frequency of which a legal guardian is at the bedside of children admitted to the PICU that are eligible for research studies.DesignA prospective, observational study.SettingThree tertiary Canadian PICUs.PatientsTwo hundred one patients were admitted to the PICU between September 2021 and March 2023 (site 1), from March 2019 to March 2020 and March 2022 to March 2023 (site 2), and from March 2019 to March 2020 and July 2020 to November 2021 (site 3).InterventionsNone.Measurements And Main ResultsAt each center, the duration of consent encounters was recorded for patients eligible for research by documenting the length of each attempt (min). The frequency of parental presence at bedside and the ability for a guardian to make a decision were also recorded. Thirty-five percent of patients eligible for research did not have a legal guardian at the bedside on the first attempted consent encounter. Twenty-three percent of approached patients were not enrolled due to an inability for a consent decision to be made by the child's legal guardian or an inability to contact the guardian before discharge.ConclusionsThe absence of legal guardians in the PICU poses a barrier to the enrollment of critically ill children in pertinent research studies and suggests that a model of deferred consent or implied consent would aid in the future of critical care research.Copyright © 2024 by the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Federation of Pediatric Intensive and Critical Care Societies.

23 keywords...

hide…