AAP Provides New Guidance on Collaborative Care of Hospitalized Children 

The care of children with acute or complex diagnoses often requires teams of health care providers. The American Academy of Pediatrics is issuing a clinical report, “Comanagement of Surgical Pediatric Patients in the Acute Care Inpatient Setting,” to be published online on December 18 and in the January 2024 issue of Pediatrics, offering guidance for pediatric health care teams on how best to work together to ensure the highest quality of care for children with surgical problems.  According to research, the number of pediatric hospital medicine programs involved in caring for surgical patients increased from 44% to 90% between 1997 and 2020, and about 40% of pediatric surgery and 60% of pediatric orthopedic programs use comanagement for patient care. This clinical report, which drew input from experts in pediatric specialties—such as orthopedics, neurosurgery, surgery, anesthesiology, urology, and others—addresses the need for standards, training, and best practices to guide these collaborative programs. Clinical reports created by AAP are written by medical experts, reflect the latest evidence in the field, and go through several rounds of peer review before being approved by the AAP Board of Directors and published in Pediatrics. This clinical report sets standards for identifying hospital leaders of comanagement programs; elucidating goals, expectations and requirements of these programs; ensuring additional training required by members of the health care team; and establishing metrics on program outcomes. Given the high prevalence of collaborative care of hospitalized children with surgical problems across all types of hospitals and practices, this clinical report will assist hospitals, doctors and other health care providers involved in creating and improving comanagement programs.  

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The American Academy of Pediatrics is an organization of 67,000 primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists dedicated to the health, safety and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults.