Helping parents make emergency room decisions

Every day, hundreds of parents in Canada rush their children to the emergency department, often for common illnesses like ear infections, fevers, or stomach bugs.

Here’s the surprising part: As many as one in four of these emergency department visits is considered avoidable. This means the child didn’t need emergency care, or the condition could have been treated elsewhere: by a family doctor, at a clinic, or through telehealth. Reducing these unnecessary visits could help address crowded emergency rooms and long wait times for everyone.

Drs. Shannon Scott and Lisa Hartling have spent more than two decades tackling this issue.

“We believe in the power of parent experiences,” says Dr. Shannon Scott. “Parents’ experiences merged with the best available research evidence is a powerful tool to help parents make health care decisions about very common childhood conditions.”

With that philosophy, Drs. Scott and Hartling and their team developed resources including videos and infographics about common childhood illnesses. These knowledge translation tools provide information for families about symptoms, how to manage them, when to seek care and whether that should be at the emergency department or elsewhere where possible. As a result, parents are empowered and can feel confident about the decisions they make.

Together with families, caregivers, and health care providers, the researchers have developed more than 40 resources on common conditions including asthma, concussion, COVID-19, ear infections, fever, gastroenteritis, and urinary tract infections.

The resources have been hugely successful with parents and health care workers in Canada and beyond, with more than 500,000 downloads in more than 100 countries. In Alberta, their resource videos are played at nearly 400 sites such as hospital and walk-in clinic waiting rooms.

Looking ahead, Drs. Scott and Hartling are developing new resources and making them easily available to parents and health care workers. “We continuously work with emergency care providers to identify emerging conditions, then we work with parents to get them the information they need,” says Dr. Hartling.