Emergency Medical Services for Children (EMSC)

Treating infants, children, and teens seeking emergency medical care requires specialized pediatric skills, training, and equipment. EMSC expands and improves emergency care for children through research, partnership, and practice.

A recent study involving nearly 1000 emergency departments reported that when an emergency department was well-prepared to care for their pediatric patients, they experienced 60-76% lower short-term mortality and 41-66% lower long-term mortality among children. Had all emergency departments been well-prepared—what the study terms having "high-readiness"—more than 1400 pediatric deaths may have been prevented during the study years.

Our EMSC work aims to prevent deaths and make sure that children live their healthiest lives.

EMSC resources

The Child and Adolescent Health Emergency Planning Toolkit

One in four families in the United States has at least one child with a special health care need. Health care, public health, and social services providers may find it harder to meet these needs during emergencies. This new toolkit can help. Health care, public health, and social services providers can use this toolkit to help ensure that children with special health care needs and their families and caregivers receive timely and accurate information about hazards and safety before, during, and after an emergency.

This toolkit was supported by MCHB's Divisions of Services for Children with Special Health Needs and of Child, Adolescent, and Family Health in partnership with the HHS Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.

Our awardees

We fund various EMSC projects, awarding 71 grants and cooperative agreements to state governments and schools of medicine.

Our investments spur improvements

Access our awardee's work that builds the systems of services for children through:

• Emergency Medical Services for Children Innovation and Improvement Center (EIIC)
• EMSC Data Center
  • National EMSC Data Analysis Resource Center (NEDARC)
  • EMSC Data Coordinating Center
• Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network

Funding details

For information about the following Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) and their funding cycles, please reach out to Theresa Morrison-Quinata, EMSC Branch Chief

• EMSC Data Center (2022 archived Notice of Funding Opportunity HRSA-22-087)
• EMSC Innovation and Improvement Center (EIIC) (2020 archived Notice of Funding Opportunity HRSA-20-037)
• EMSC State Partnerships (2022 archived Notice of Funding Opportunity HRSA-23-063)
  • National EMSC Data Analysis Resource Center (NEDARC)
• EMSC State Partnership Rural Expansion Program (2021 archived Notice of Funding Opportunity HRSA-21-108)
• Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) (2023 archived Notice of Funding Opportunity HRSA-23-073)
• EMSC Targeted Issues Program (2019 archived Notice of Funding Opportunity HRSA-19-051)
• Regional Pediatric Pandemic Network

EMSC in context

Since 1985, our EMSC work has helped seriously ill and injured children. We make sure that—no matter where a child lives—the health systems in their area provide quality emergency care services.

The goals are to improve access and quality of emergency care for children and reduce serious injury or death.

The program also provides leadership in improving emergency services for children and teens both before they get to the hospital and after they arrive at the emergency department.

We do this through funding, partnership, and practice:

• We fund research networks and individual research projects that conduct studies to set the standards of optimal emergency care for children.
• We partner with state governments, first responders, nurses, and doctors to:
  
  • Develop policies that expand best practices based on the research
  • Share expertise with and among states and territories
• Through training and putting new standards into practice, we make sure:
  
  • Medical first responders and hospital staff use the best methods and age-appropriate equipment to care for children
  • Research improves and expands the quality of care and the systems of care