Medical and surgical advancements have enabled a 95% survival rate for children with CHD. However, these survivors are disproportionately affected by neurodevelopmental disabilities. In particular, they have behavioural problems in toddlerhood. Because there is a known relationship between behavioural problems and early language delay, we hypothesise that children with critical CHD have early detectable language deficits. To test our hypothesis, we performed a retrospective study on a cohort of children with critical CHD to visualise their early language developmental trajectories.

We identified a cohort of 27 children with two diagnoses: single ventricle physiology (19) and transposition of the great arteries (8). As part of their routine clinical care, all of these children had serial developmental evaluations with the language subsection of the Capute Scales. We visualised their developmental language trajectories as a function of chronologic age, and we used a univariate linear regression model to calculate diagnosis-specific expected developmental age equivalents.

In each group, language development is age-appropriate in infancy. Deviation from age-appropriate development is apparent by 18 months. This results in borderline-mild language delay by 30 months.

Using the Capute Scales, our team quantified early language development in infants and toddlers with critical CHD. Our identification of deceleration in skill acquisition reinforces the call for ongoing neurodevelopmental surveillance in these children. Understanding early language development will help clinicians provide informed anticipatory guidance to families of children with critical CHD.

Children with single ventricle physiology and transposition of the great arteries have measurable early language delays.

A standardised multi-site approach to manage paediatric post-operative chylothorax does not exist and leads to unnecessary practice variation. The Chylothorax Work Group utilised the Pediatric Critical Care Consortium infrastructure to address this gap.

Over 60 multi-disciplinary providers representing 22 centres convened virtually as a quality initiative to develop an algorithm to manage paediatric post-operative chylothorax. Agreement was objectively quantified for each recommendation in the algorithm by utilising an anonymous survey. “Consensus” was defined as ≥ 80% of responses as “agree” or “strongly agree” to a recommendation. In order to determine if the algorithm recommendations would be correctly interpreted in the clinical environment, we developed ex vivo simulations and surveyed patients who developed the algorithm and patients who did not.

The algorithm is intended for all children (<18 years of age) within 30 days of cardiac surgery. It contains rationale for 11 central chylothorax management recommendations; diagnostic criteria and evaluation, trial of fat-modified diet, stratification by volume of daily output, timing of first-line medical therapy for “low” and “high” volume patients, and timing and duration of fat-modified diet. All recommendations achieved “consensus” (agreement >80%) by the workgroup (range 81–100%). Ex vivo simulations demonstrated good understanding by developers (range 94–100%) and non-developers (73%–100%).

The quality improvement effort represents the first multi-site algorithm for the management of paediatric post-operative chylothorax. The algorithm includes transparent and objective measures of agreement and understanding. Agreement to the algorithm recommendations was >80%, and overall understanding was 94%.