Evaluation and Active Management of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in Pediatric Acute Care: Time to Standardize

The acute care setting plays an important role in the proper diagnosis and management of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) in children and adolescents. Increasingly, urgent care centers have become the frontline location for most routine injuries in the evolving medical neighborhood. Urgent care centers have progressively become the sites for initial evaluation of mTBI with a need for consistent tools for diagnosis or management. This article describes a pathway for pediatric providers in urgent or emergency care centers using a standardized Screen-Inform-Prevent process. Standardizing the process of screening, evaluation, discharge guidance, and referral/communication using the clinical pathway and tools will better serve the needs of children and adolescents presenting to the acute care setting with mTBI.