By standardizing blood culture collection methods, optimizing blood volume, creating checklists, and reinforcing nurse education, we were able to develop a best practice for pediatric blood culture collection and reduce blood culture contamination to a sustainable low rate at our children's hospital.

Objectives: Pediatric Early Warning Scores (PEWS) are an easy-to-use diagnostic tool for patient evaluation. The goal of this study was to determine if using PEWS in our pediatric emergency department (PED) at the time of admission to the hospital was associated with a decrease in the number of emergency response calls within 6 hours of admission.Methods: A retrospective chart review of 6 months before (May 2013-October 2013) and after (December 2013-May 2014) initiation of PEWS upon inpatient admission from our urban, tertiary care PED was conducted to determine the number of patients who had emergency response calls within 6 hours of admission. Results:The percentage of patients admitted from the PED who required an emergency response call within 6 hours of admission dropped from 1.77% in the 6 months before assigning PEWS to 0.79% in the 6 months after, a 55% reduction (P = 0.0070). Conclusions:Assigning PEWS to patients being admitted to our hospital from the PED was associated with a reduced number of emergency response calls in the period immediately after admission.

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