There is wide variation in institutional sedation strategies in paediatric cardiac ICU. Validated tools such as State Behavioral Scale and Richmond Agitation Sedation Scale were created to help standardise sedation practices.

This is a multi-phase, multicentre, prospective project with the goal of optimising safety and comfort for paediatric cardiac ICU patients. Phase one consisted of an educational intervention with a self-paced, web-based video module on optimal sedation practices using validated sedation screening tools. Participant knowledge was assessed via a de-identified, unmatched pre- and post-test survey. Survey scores were reported as an aggregate average score and compared using a t-test.

There were 259 pre-tests, and 142 post-tests collected during the video-assisted educational intervention. There was a significant increase in mean score on the post-test compared to the pre-test for both instruments: from 4 to 4.8/10 for State Behavioral Scale (p = 0.01) and from 4.5 to 4.9 for Richmond Agitation Sedation Scale (p = 0.04). 81% of respondents who completed the Richmond Agitation Sedation Scale post-test and 88.1% of those who completed the State Behavioral Scale post-test said their practice would change based on the new knowledge acquired.

We report that our newly developed learning module intervention was effective in increasing short-term knowledge about optimal sedation and sedation scoring. Ongoing phase two efforts include evaluation of long-term compliance of validated sedation screening tools and developing an objective score to measure individual cumulative opioid dosing in the cardiac critical care unit.