Applicability of the Australian and New Zealand Paediatric Intensive Care Registry diagnostic codes and Paediatric Index of Mortality 2 scoring system in a Croatian paediatric intensive care unit

Excerpt

The severity of illness scoring systems enable benchmarking of standard of care among various paediatric intensive care units (PICU). The most accurate validation of a scoring system is the system’s evaluation in a population other than that from which the score is derived [3]. PICUs that collaborated in the Paediatric Index of Mortality (PIM2) study are large units, and most of them pertain to the Australian centralised paediatric intensive care service [5]. The PIM2 evaluates the condition of the patient at the first contact, during the first hour after arrival in the PICU. The score is calculated on linear regression equations from ten physiological and clinical data that can be routinely collected by trained medical staff. The Australian and New Zealand Paediatric Intensive Care Registry (ANZPIC Registry) diagnostic codes is a proposed diagnostic coding system for international use. The Registry codes the principal and up to five associated diagnoses [4]. We performed a prospective, observational study to evaluate the applicability of the ANZPIC Registry diagnostic codes, and validity of the PIM2 scoring system in a PICU diverse from those in which the two systems were created. The PICU of the Clinical Hospital Split is a regional, seven-bed, tertiary multidisciplinary unit of a public, university-affiliated hospital. …