Overview Summary of Project
When faced with children paramedics (and other healthcare professionals) may have to estimate weight which can be used as a basis for administering drugs. Many estimation techniques rely on the patient’s chronological age however this has been shown to be unreliable (Black et al., 2002; Marlow et al., 2011; Charlton, Capsey and Moat, 2020), and in some cases a patient’s age may be unknown. Other techniques include parental estimation (Krieser et al., 2007) and measuring systems based on height and size (e.g. Braselow tape). Anecdotally paramedics may use a child’s clothing size to estimate age, and thus weight, when this is unknown.
It is expected that the findings of this study will be used to improve the safe and effective treatment of children treated by paramedics by informing methods to estimate weight.
This study will use a combination of face-to-face and online questionnaires to compare parental estimation, age-based formulae, and clothing size based formulae to establish their accuracy. The reference standard will be that 70% of estimations are within 10% of the actual weight, and 95% are within 20% (Wells et al., 2017).
