Consensus-Based Recommendations for Standardizing Terminology and Reporting Adverse Events for Emergency Department Procedural Sedation and Analgesia in Children

Children commonly require sedation and analgesia for procedures in the emergency department. Establishing accurate adverse event and complications rates from the available literature has been difficult because of the difficulty in aggregating results from previous studies that have used varied terminology to describe the same adverse events and outcomes. Further, serious adverse events occur infrequently, necessitating the study of large numbers of children to assess safety. These limitations prevent the establishment of a sufficiently large database on which evidence-based practice guidelines may be based. We assembled a panel of pediatric sedation researchers and experts to develop consensus-based recommendations for standardizing procedural sedation and analgesia terminology and reporting of adverse events. Our goal was to create a uniform reporting mechanism for future studies to facilitate the aggregation and comparison of results. [Ann Emerg Med. 2009;53:426-435.]