Participating Sites and Research Team

Dr. Olivier Drouin
Université de Montréal, Sainte Justine University Hospital Center

Dr. Patricia Li
Montreal Children’s Hospital, McGill University

Dr. Sanjay Mahant
University of Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute, Pediatric Inpatient Research Network (PIRN)

Dr. Peter Gill
University of Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute, Pediatric Inpatient Research Network (PIRN)

What Do We Want To Know?

Bronchiolitis is one of the most common reasons babies and young children are hospitalized. While national guidelines recommend simple, supportive care, some hospitals still use tests and treatments that don’t help. These differences in care can mean that some children get extra or unnecessary care compared to others, which means they might spend more time in the hospital than they should.

This project wants to find out if these differences in care are linked to things like a child’s race or ethnicity, family income, or language spoken by the family by looking at past research. The team will look at how these factors relate to how long children stay in the hospital, if they need intensive care, or if they have other health problems.

How Are We Doing It?

By looking at research papers published since the year 2000, the researchers are studying babies under 2 years old who were hospitalized with bronchiolitis. They will look at data about each child’s background and care to see how often low-value tests or treatments are used.

How Is The Project Going?

We have screened nearly 5,000 abstracts, yielding 65 full-texts that will be included in our forthcoming manuscript. We are in the process of abstracting the relevant data from those 65 full-texts, which will allow us to synthesize the ways in which sociodemographic characteristics and markers of structural inequities may contribute to low-value care in children hospitalized with bronchiolitis. Next, we’ll put all that data together in a manuscript to be submitted for publication.

Who Is Included?

The studies the research team looked at included babies under 2 years old who are in the hospital with bronchiolitis.