Quicker emergency pain care for children with sickle cell disease
Official title: Sickle Cell Improvement: ENhancing Care in the Emergency Department (SCIENCE)
Funded at Nemours Children's Hospital, Delaware · NIH-11142406 · Data updated 2026-11-12
This project is testing a clear emergency care plan to speed up pain relief for children with sickle cell disease when they come to the emergency department.
Quick facts
| Grant type | U01 cooperative agreement |
|---|---|
| Study type | NIH-funded research |
| Funding institution | Nemours Children's Hospital, Delaware NIH-funded |
| Lab location | 1 site (Wilmington, United States) |
| Project start | September 1, 2021 |
| Project end | July 31, 2026 |
| Funding year | 2025 |
| Award (this year) | $842,385 |
| NIH project number | 5U01HL159850-05 |
| Project ID | NIH-11142406 on NIH RePORTER |
Who could benefit from this research
✓Could help
Children with sickle cell disease who present to a participating emergency department with an acute painful vaso-occlusive crisis are the intended participants.
✕Less likely to help
Adults, people without sickle cell disease, or children seen outside participating emergency departments are unlikely to be helped by this project.
What this research studies
If your child with sickle cell disease comes to a participating emergency department with a painful crisis, hospitals would follow a step-by-step care pathway designed to get pain medicines and other treatments started faster. The team is using several implementation strategies (like staff training, workflow changes, and tracking systems) to help emergency departments adopt the guideline-based pathway. Researchers will measure how many children the pathway reaches, how widely EDs adopt it, and how well the pathway is carried out in real cases. The goal is to make guideline-recommended care happen reliably during acute pain visits.
Why it matters
Potential benefit: If successful, this could mean quicker pain relief, fewer hospital stays, and better quality of life for children with sickle cell pain crises.
How similar studies have gone: Guideline-based protocols and targeted quality-improvement efforts have improved timely pain treatment in some settings, but broad adoption in emergency departments has been limited and this project focuses on spreading those practices.
Where this research is happening
-
Nemours Children's Hospital, Delaware
Wilmington, United States Active
Researchers
- Principal investigator: Brousseau, David C — Nemours Children's Hospital, Delaware
- Study coordinator: Brousseau, David C
About this research
- This is an active NIH-funded research project — typically early-stage science, not a clinical trial accepting patient enrollment.
- Some NIH-funded labs run parallel clinical studies or seek volunteers for related work. To check, contact the principal investigator or institution listed above.
- For full project details, budget, and progress reports, visit the official NIH RePORTER page.