Assessment Tools for Use During Anesthesia-Centric Pediatric Advanced Life Support Training and Evaluation

Abstract Background Pediatric perioperative cardiac arrests are rare events that require rapid, skilled and coordinated efforts to optimize outcomes. We developed an assessment tool for assessing clinician performance during perioperative critical events termed Anesthesia-centric Pediatric Advanced Life Support (A-PALS). Here, we describe the development and evaluation of the A-PALS scoring instrument. Methods A group of raters scored videos of a perioperative team managing simulated events representing a range of scenarios and competency. We assessed agreement with the reference standard grading, as well as interrater and intrarater reliability. Results Overall, raters agreed with the reference standard 86.2% of the time. Rater scores concerning scenarios that depicted highly competent performance correlated better with the reference standard than scores from scenarios that depicted low clinical competence ( P P P Conclusions This study provides evidence for the validity of the A-PALS scoring instrument and demonstrates that the scoring instrument can provide reliable scores, although clinician performance affects reliability.