Identifying Pediatric Emergence Delirium by Using the PAED Scale: A Quality Improvement Project

Pediatric emergence delirium is a postoperative phenomenon characterized by aberrant cognitive and psychomotor behavior, which can place the patient and health care personnel at risk for injury. A common tool for identifying emergence delirium is the Level of Consciousness-Richmond Agitation and Sedation Scale (LOC-RASS), although it has not been validated for use in the pediatric population. The Pediatric Anesthesia Emergence Delirium Scale (PAED) is a newly validated tool to measure emergence delirium in children. We chose to implement and evaluate the effectiveness and fidelity of using the PAED Scale to identify pediatric emergence delirium in one eight-bed postanesthesia care unit in comparison with the traditional LOC-RASS. The overall incidence of pediatric emergence delirium found by using the LOC-RASS with a retrospective chart review (3%) was significantly lower than the incidence found by using the LOC-RASS (7.5%) and PAED Scale (11.5%) during the implementation period. Our findings suggest that the PAED Scale may be a more sensitive measure of pediatric emergence delirium, and, in the future, we recommend that health care personnel at our facility use the PAED Scale rather than the LOC-RASS.