Care for children with concussions can vary widely across emergency departments, even when clinical practice guidelines are available. To address this, the Maternal Newborn Child & Youth Strategic Clinical Network, part of Alberta Health Services, conducted a stepped wedge, cluster randomized trial in five Alberta emergency departments.
This presentation will share how the trial was developed and carried out, highlight the results on health outcomes, reflect on key lessons from implementation and explore the ongoing impact on pediatric concussion care.
Keith Owen Yeates, PhD, ABPP, FCAHS, FRSC is a professor of Psychology and an adjunct professor of Pediatrics and Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Calgary. A pediatric neuropsychologist with more than 30 years of funded research, his work focuses on childhood brain disorders, especially traumatic brain injury and concussion. He has authored more of the top 100 cited papers in pediatric TBI than any other researcher worldwide and ranks seventh internationally for total TBI-related publications from 2000 to 2022.
Yeates was co-lead author of the report of the Centers for Disease Control Expert Panel on Acute Diagnosis and Management of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury among Children and Adolescents, an invited expert panel member at the 6th International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport in Amsterdam and an invited member of the expert consensus group for the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM) Diagnostic Criteria for Mild Traumatic Brain Injury. Keith is the inaugural Chair of the Canadian Concussion Network, Editor-in-Chief of Neuropsychology, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada. In 2020, he was recognized as one of the 10 most influential neuropsychologists in North America over the past 50 years.
