Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Acad Emerg Med
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Enrolling children in research studies in the emergency department (ED) is typically dependent on the presence of a guardian to provide written informed consent. ⋯ Nearly one-half of children with nontrivial blunt head trauma evaluated in the ED may not have a guardian available during their initial ED evaluation. Patients whose guardians are not available at the time of initial ED evaluation are older and have more severe mechanisms of injury and more serious head trauma. ED research studies of pediatric trauma patients that require written informed consent from a guardian at the time of initial ED evaluation and treatment may have difficulty enrolling targeted sample size numbers and will likely be limited by enrollment bias.