Publication
Executive Summary of Society of Critical Care Medicine 2026 Guidelines on the Care and Management of Pediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care Patients at the End of Life
Derrington S, Broden Arciprete E, Lin M, Oczkowski S, Alladin A, Anani U, Borchik A, Collins C, Delgado-Corcoran C, Dickerman M, Harrod C, Henner N, Kon A, Lewis-Newby M, Lord B, Masters A, McCarthy S, Moynihan K, Munoz-Blanco S, Rissman L, Roberts K, Schlegel A, Schopen A, Siegel L, Swasey H, Wawrzynski S, Zorko D, DeCourcey D · Pediatric Critical Care Medicine · 2026
These Society of Critical Care Medicine 2026 guidelines provide evidence-based recommendations to improve end-of-life (EOL) care for critically ill infants and children in PICU (including cardiac ICU) and neonatal ICU. Using rigorous Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation methodology, including a systematic review through November 2025, and a multidisciplinary expert panel, the guidelines focus on five Patient, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome (PICO) questions (Table 1), emphasizing patient- and family-centered outcomes, implementation feasibility, and attention to health equity. Five conditional recommendations and one good practice statement were developed (Table 2). The strength of these recommendations was severely limited by the very low certainty of evidence related to several factors, including risk of bias, indirectness of the interventions, nonstandardized outcome measurements, and imprecision. The full guidelines, including all five recommendations and supportive evidence, may be accessed via the Society of Critical Care Medicine's Guidelines (1). These online resources also include a toolkit developed by a subset of the writing panel, designed to help ICU leaders effectively implement the recommendations in their local environments. A visual abstract of the guidelines is included in Figure 1 in (1). Key recommendations highlighted below are those with the greatest direct impact on patient and clinician experience.
Synced from the TRENDS in Pediatric Palliative Care Zotero library, curated by The Siden Research Team. ICPCN does not host or verify the full text.