• Nienke Seiger, Ian Maconochie, Rianne Oostenbrink, and Henriëtte A Moll.
• Department of Pediatrics, Room Sp 1540, Erasmus MC-Sophia Children's Hospital, University Medical Centre Rotterdam, PO Box 2060, 3000 CB Rotterdam, Netherlands. h.a.moll@erasmusmc.nl.
• Pediatrics. 2013 Oct 1;132(4):e841-50.

ObjectivePediatric early warning scores (PEWS) are being advocated for use in the emergency department (ED). The goal of this study was to compare the validity of different PEWS in a pediatric ED.MethodsTen different PEWS were evaluated in a large prospective cohort. We included children aged <16 years who had presented to the ED of a university hospital in The Netherlands (2009-2012). The validity of the PEWS for predicting ICU admission or hospitalization was expressed by the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves.ResultsThese PEWS were validated in 17 943 children. Two percent of these children were admitted to the ICU, and 16% were hospitalized. The areas under the ROC curves for predicting ICU admission, ranging from 0.60 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.57-0.62) to 0.82 (95% CI: 0.79-0.85), were moderate to good. The area under the ROC curves for predicting hospitalization was poor to moderate (range: 0.56 [95% CI: 0.55-0.58] to 0.68 [95% CI: 0.66-0.69]). The sensitivity and specificity derived from the ROC curves ranged widely for both ICU admission (sensitivity: 61.3%-94.4%; specificity: 25.2%-86.7%) and hospital admission (sensitivity: 36.4%-85.7%; specificity: 27.1%-90.5%). None of the PEWS had a high sensitivity as well as a high specificity.ConclusionsPEWS can be used to detect children presenting to the ED who are in need of an ICU admission. Scoring systems, wherein the parameters are summed to a numeric value, were better able to identify patients at risk than triggering systems, which need 1 positive parameter.

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