Evaluation of pediatric intensive care in Europe

There are no reports analyzing the results of pediatric intensive care in Europe. We evaluated quantitatively the severity of illness and the amount of care required for 714 consecutively admitted patients. We used simultaneously the Clinical Classification System (CCS) the Acute Physiology Score (APS) and the Therapeutic Intervention Scoring System (TISS). Overall mortality at 1 month was 15%. The mortality rate was higher for CCS Class IV patients (32.3%) than for CCS III (4.5%) and CCS II (3.2%). The difference was significant between CCS IV and CCS III and II respectively (p 35 which probably represent the real class IV patients. Some discrepancies among the different institutions participating in the study suggest the need for further studies before the use of such score for interinstitutional comparisons and for evaluation of efficacy of therapy in multicenter studies.