Pediatric Pain, Agitation, Neuromuscular Blockade, and Delirium in Critically Ill Pediatric Patients (PANDEM)

Welcome to PICU Doc On Call, A Podcast Dedicated to Current and Aspiring Intensivists.I'm Pradip Kamat and I’m Kate Phelps, a second-year pediatric critical care fellow joining Pradip and Rahul today!I'm Rahul Damania and we are coming to you from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta - Emory University School of Medicine.Today we are honored to have Dr. John Berkenbosch- senior author of the Prevention and Management of Pain, Agitation, Neuromuscular Blockade, and Delirium in Critically Ill Pediatric Patients with consideration of the ICU Environment and Early Mobility (PANDEM) guidelines recently published in February 2022 issue of the Pediatric Critical Care journal.Dr. Berkenbosch is a Professor of Pediatrics and Pediatric Critical Care at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, and continues to be nationally recognized as an expert in pediatric procedural sedation with multiple publications relating to sedation practices, particularly novel uses of procedural sedation medications and regimens. He currently also serves as co-chair for the American College of Critical Care Medicine’s Task Force guidelines for sedation and analgesia in critically ill children which we will be discussing in today’s episode. Dr. Berkenbosch’s research interests have primarily focused on pediatric procedural sedation and implementation of technology advances in Pediatric Critical Care and have resulted in 57 publications as well as several book chaptersRahul: Dr. Berkenbosch welcome to the PICU Doc ON call podcast. I would also like to point out that the free full access to the PANDEM guidelines is available online at pccmjournal.orgDr. Berkenbosch: Thanks Rahul and Pradip. I am excited to be on the PICU Doc on Call Podcast to discuss the PANDEM guidelines. I want to first start by giving a huge shout-out to all the team members who contributed to these guidelines’ development. This is a topic about which I am quite passionate but also one that provides much-needed guidance regarding pain/agitation/delirium to our entire pediatric critical care community!KATE: Dr. Berkenbosch, the rationale for the development of the PANDEM guidelines was the high variability in pediatric sedation and analgesia. Can you speak to this variability and why it was important to address that variability?That is a great question, the variability has been one of the key motivators in the creation of these guidelines. We also wanted to develop a guideline that was broader in scope than what was currently available. The ICU Liberation bundle provided a paradigm for liberating critically ill patients from mechanical ventilation and the ICU environment and as we delved into developing these guidelines, we realized that many elements of the ICU liberation bundle aligned very closely with PICU sedation and analgesia so it made imminent sense to incorporate all of these topics into the guidelines, an acknowledgment if you will, that PICU liberation & sedation go hand in hand!Absolutely, as we have stated in our prior episodes, the paradigm is: intubate → ventilate → liberate, and sedation/analgesia is intertwined in each of these processes.Dr. Berkenbosch, as we get into the guidelines, can you please highlight how the search strategy for these guidelines were derived?Of course, this was a remarkable group effort solicited by the Society of Critical Care Medicine. We were initially modeled after the adult PAD (pain, agitation, and delirium) guidelines task force but, as described already, extended beyond that to include Pediatric Pain, Agitation, Neuromuscular Blockade, and Delirium in addition to the PICU Environment and Early Mobility. It was comprised of 29 national experts who collaborated over a ten-year period. The full task force gathered annually in person during the Society of Critical Care Medicine Congress for progress reports and further strategizing with the final face-to-face meeting occurring in February 2020, in addition to periodic teleconferences to keep us on track between congresses. Throughout this process, the Society of Critical Care Medicine standard operating procedures Manual for Guidelines development was adhered to.KATE: Dr. Berkenbosch, what a robust process, what were some research principles you can highlight in the development of this content?We created a created descriptive and actionable Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome set of questions. An experienced medical information specialist developed search strategies to identify relevant literature between January 1990 and January 2020. Controlled vocabulary was incorporated (such as, “ICUs, Pediatric,” “Critical Illness,” “Ventilators,” “Mechanical”) along with keywords (e.g., “PICU,” “critically ill,” “intubation”) in addition to a sensitive pediatric filter to identify records specific to this population.Dr. Berkenbosch, as we look into the guidelines, we see the term conditional cited frequently. Do you mind highlighting how this term relates to the strength of recommendation as well as the quality of evidence?This relates heavily to the available literature addressing each question we asked. Based on the quality of available evidence, recommendations were considered strong where the available evidence made additional data unlikely to alter our recommendations, conditional where we felt that new data might alter recommendations. Where evidence was inadequate to make a formal recommendation but we felt a practice was very low risk and likely beneficial, we made what we referred to as Good Practice statements.How should a resident or a fellow in training approach these guidelines? There are almost 37 pages worth of content as well as a large very informative supplement.Add an initial glance, this document can look daunting. We placed a table with all of the recommendations alone at the beginning of the guidelines for quick reference. We also created an infographic, also found near the beginning of the article which graphically shows how all the domains we discuss are related and highlights specific recommendations. We really felt that this diagram put the recommendations themselves into a picture that makes clinical and intuitive sense. Additional discussing guidelines at a Divisional level -especially fellow conferences, examining your institutional practices, etc. may additionally be valuable to aid trainees in unpacking everything.If you have not checked out our most recent episode, role & reach of the Librarian in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, please definitely check this out!Let's transition and talk about the PANDEM Guidelines: We will divide up the recommendations into broad categories, namely: Analgesia, Sedation, Neuromuscular blockade, ICU delirium, Withdrawal, and Environment Optimization. Let’s start with Analgesia. This Portion of the guidelines addresses The utility of developmentally appropriate pain scores as well as certain analgesics.What pain assessment tools do the PANDEM guidelines recommend? why not vitals signs as a way to assess postoperative pain in the critically-ill pediatric patient?Let me start with what we don’t recommend here, that being reliance on vital signs alone. As we all know, vital sign abnormalities are common in PICU patients and these abnormalities can have multiple causes including the underlying medical or surgical reason for PICU admission, medications we use to treat the diseases kids admitted to our PICUs, or pain and/or agitation. Hence, while helpful, vital sign changes are just not very sensitive to pain or agitation. Now to tools. First off, we wanted to recommend the use of tools validated within PICU patients as we discovered literature describing multiple tools, many of which had not been formally validated. As kids' developmental capacities also change over time, we wanted to make sure that the tools we recommend cover the spectrum of age and developmental capabilities. Ultimately, we came to recommend the use of 4 self-report scales for children over 6 years of age who can communicate their pain and 2 observational scales which cover kids unable to communicate their pain for whatever reason (being intubated, underlying diseases with mental status changes, developmental inability for example). These 2 categories of tools also do not have to be mutually exclusive and can be used concurrently.RAHUL: As a follow-up, what about non-opioid analgesia - I see a huge push from surgeons to focus more on nonopioid adjuncts, rather than opioid infusions—whereas the PANDEM guidelines say that for...