Evaluation tools for pediatric critical care patients.

This article reviews evaluation tools available for pediatric critical care patients, including treatment efficacy scores, scores for assessing disease severity at admission, and organ dysfunction scores. Some of the uses of these tools are discussed. At present, routine: assessment of resource utilization relies only on an inventory of diagnostic and/or therapeutic procedures: the Omega ICR, which has been fully validated and shown to correlate to the nursing care workload, should be used in France until the development of analytical accounting methods provides a means of measuring costs. The PRISM severity score can be recommended for the age range going from full-term neonates to adolescents. The PIM has not been validated in France. PRISM III is without doubt more accurate than the earlier PRISM versions but its authors charge an annual fee to users. The CRIB seems to be the best score for premature neonates but needs to be evaluated in France. Chronic conditions should be factored into severity assessments in pediatric patients. A promising avenue of research is the development of dynamic scores that analyze daily changes in organ dysfunction parameters.