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NASEMSO Announces a New Cooperative Agreement Project

March 23, 2023

The National Association of State Emergency Medical Services Officials (NASEMSO) is excited to announce the start of a new cooperative agreement project, funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Emergency Medical Services, to take critical, initial steps to improve the safety of children transported by ambulance.

This 15-month project will focus on drafting crash test methodology intended to evaluate the safety of commercially available devices used to secure children in the back of an ambulance.  Test methods will be drafted for three unique transport situations:

  1. supine pediatric patients (i.e., laying on their back on an adult sized cot);
  2. seated pediatric patients or child passengers; and
  3. supine neonatal patients.

This project is the first phase of a three-step process to develop, validate, and publish these three new child restraint test methods. This project will be completed collaboratively with industry experts (product manufacturers and ambulance builders), EMS clinicians, crash test laboratories, and federal and state partners. Once the test methods have been drafted, NASEMSO hopes to support the next phase of the project: crash testing of pediatric restraint devices currently available in the U.S. market. When funded, the crash testing phase will be used to both validate the draft test methods and evaluate existing and newly designed pediatric transport products.

The Technical Project Lead is Jim Green, who recently retired from his role on a related multi-year research project at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). The NIOSH-led collaborative project drove dramatic improvements in EMS clinician and adult patient ambulance crash safety. Green will utilize a similar approach in the effort to improve child safety in ground ambulances. NASEMSO support is provided by Rachael Alter (Project Manager) and Adrienne Wilson (Project Coordinator).

For more information, contact Rachael Alter at alter@nasemso.org.