Pediatric Acute Care Research (PACeR) Training Program. - PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Although 30 million children seek emergency care each year in the United States, and up to 250,000 require intensive care, few pediatric emergency and critical care medicine trainees pursue research careers. Advancing research in emergency and critical care medicine is essential to address the unique and complex needs of critically ill and injured children, improve outcomes, and close significant knowledge gaps. The Pediatric Acute Care Research (PACeR) training program will address this critical shortage of acute care pediatrician-scientists and the paucity of research training opportunities in pediatric emergency and critical care medicine. Acute care represents a continuum from pre-hospital care to emergency care to inpatient/critical care to recovery. Research in the acute care setting presents unique challenges and opportunities. The PACeR curriculum will be tailored to provide essential knowledge and skills specific to developing a research career in these settings. A key innovation that sets the PACeR program apart is “de-siloing”: bringing together emergency and critical care trainees under a single, multidisciplinary umbrella, rather than distinct training programs for emergency medicine, critical care, or organ system-specific investigators. The PACeR program will provide postdoctoral scholars with mentored, experiential research opportunities, didactics, seminars, apprenticeships, and other career development experiences, with a focus on respiratory conditions, acute cardiovascular dysfunction, and resuscitation, the chief pathways to morbidity and mortality in children and key focus areas in the mission of NHLBI. The program will achieve 3 aims: (1) recruit and train collaborative scholars to design and conduct rigorous, high-impact pediatric acute care research; (2) ensure trainees attain scientific expertise, professional skills, and career readiness through mentored, personalized research projects, a structured didactic core curriculum, graduate-level coursework, and professional development activities, including networking opportunities; and (3) establish an innovative, multidisciplinary training environment for pediatric acute care research that transcends traditional specialty- or organ-based training barriers. This will be achieved through guidance from internal and external advisors and a comprehensive program evaluation process. We will recruit 2 scholars each year in a 2-year program who are postdoctoral fellows or early career physicians in pediatric emergency or critical care medicine. The program has three primary components: (1) Research: scholars will lead primary investigations under the guidance of expert acute care physician-scientists; (2) Didactics: an acute care research curriculum with formal training in research methods, including the possibility of obtaining an advanced degree; and (3) Mentorship and Professional Development: exposure to a deep and varied array of acute care research leaders in the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital and Northwestern University communities.
