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Pediatric Field Investigation

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From Tragedy, Insight

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia crash investigation team conducts in-depth investigations of crashes involving children to further the goal of improving prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation of motor vehicle crash injuries in children. These investigations involve the dispatch of team personnel to complete detailed data collection from the crash scene, vehicle and treating hospital. Engineering analyses of these real world data provide an understanding of how injuries are caused and form the basis for innovations and recommendations for reducing the risk of injury to children in motor vehicle crashes.

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10 Years in the field

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has been conducting crash investigations for nearly 10 years to understand mechanisms of motor vehicle injuries to children through research projects such as Partners for Child Passenger Safety (PCPS), a research partnership with State Farm Insurance.

In 2005, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia crash investigation team was invited to join a national network of eight hospitals designated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as the Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN) .

CIREN is a multidisciplinary research network involving a collaboration of clinicians and engineers in academia, industry, and government with the mission of improving the prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation of motor vehicle crash injuries. The insights gathered through this collaboration will reduce deaths, disabilities, and human and economic costs through the study real-world cases of serious injuries sustained in car crashes. Through CIREN, crash investigations from the eight network trauma centers located across the country are pooled to allow for robust analyses.

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Methodology

With family consent, the CIREN team conducts in-depth investigations into the injuries of patients who come to Children's Hospital for treatment after a car crash. These investigations involve the dispatch of team personnel to complete detailed data collection from the crash scene, vehicle, pre-hospital care and the treating hospital. The team works with the families to understand the circumstances of the crash and the nature of the child’s injuries followed by a detailed examination of the crash scene and accident vehicle. All of these data help our engineers understand the motion of the child during the crash and identify factors that may have contributed to the child’s injuries.

These real world data are used in concert with our injury biomechanics data and computational modeling to provide a holistic understanding of how injuries are caused. This depth of analysis forms the basis for innovations and recommendations for reducing the risk of injury to children in motor vehicle crashes.

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Application of Field Analyses

The crash investigations allow researchers to monitor how new automotive safety technologies are affecting outcomes for children in crashes. The results of these investigations are reported to the federal government, the automotive industry, restraint suppliers, and other stakeholders to inform improvements to vehicle and restraint design and regulation.

Because Children’s Hospital treats adolescents through age 19, the crash investigation team also has access to teen-driver related crashes and is working cooperatively with the Center’s teen driver experts to inform their work.

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Investigating Beyond Child Passenger Injury: Pedestrian Safety Research

Pedestrians are more common among trauma admissions at Children’s Hospital than motor-vehicle occupants. This exposure to pedestrian crash injuries makes Children’s Hospital uniquely qualified to conduct investigations into mechanisms of pediatric pedestrian injury, providing much-needed data on how children interact with vehicles. This data serves as a first step in designing countermeasures to prevent future injury.

Worldwide, traffic injuries and fatalities are increasing as countries become more motorized, resulting in increasing concern for pedestrians as vulnerable road users. This has resulted in a worldwide focus on pedestrian issues including European and Australian consumer crash test programs that provide star ratings for vehicles based on their interaction with pedestrians, encouraging pedestrian-friendly vehicle designs. In the United States, children account for more than a quarter of all injured pedestrians highlighting the need to understand the child pedestrian experience in order to make these countermeasures effective for the pediatric population.

In order to address this need, the Children’s Hospital is conducting in-depth investigations of child pedestrian accidents. These data are combined with computer simulations of the impact event to determine the interaction with the front of vehicles, providing a comprehensive understanding of pedestrian kinematics, injury mechanisms, and factors associated with the risks of injury.