Our Mission

The Alberta Children’s Hospital Pediatric Clinical Care Guidelines (ACH PCCG) website is a not-for-profit initiative that makes publicly available the guidelines, pathways, protocols and procedures that are in active use at the Alberta Children’s Hospital (ACH). We aim to share best practices and promote collaboration among medical professionals and affiliated hospitals.

In making these guidelines accessible to all physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and hospital administrators, our mission is to:

• provide a platform for easy access to and the dissemination of information used within the ACH, without the requirement for a login,
• offer this collection of evidence-based guidelines for use beyond ACH,
• facilitate an open dialogue around the guidelines, encouraging clinical knowledge sharing,
• continually improve and expand upon the existing guidelines, incorporating emerging evidence and additional topic areas,
• consider the feedback received via the ACH PCCG website in the updating of existing documents and the development of future guidelines,
• thereby improve upon the standard of care provide to sick children, both internally at ACH and more widely.

In addition to the documents themselves, each topic area includes links to:

• relevant international, national and local Alberta Health Services (AHS) provincial guidelines,
• contain up to date key references,
• related materials on the ACH PCCG site, such as drug dose calculators (currently our calculators require Microsoft Excel on your computer and as such will not work on a cellphone)
• local compliance, outcome and quality assurance data that is associated with each of the guidelines (when available)

The focus of the website currently is physician care documents, but eventually the ACH PCCG may be able to host and/or link to key ACH and AHS nursing and respiratory therapy policies.

Of note is that the documents are at times institutional specific, and this is deliberate as they are working documents used at the ACH. Also, some documents are located on Alberta Health Services Insite website and unfortunately these can only be accessed by persons who have login access. We hope in the future to have all documents openly accessible. 

Dr Simon J Parsons, an intensivist in Pediatric Critical Care, directed the effort to create the body of ACH PCCG guidelines. This endeavor begun in 2010 as an internal pediatric critical care set of guidelines developed by Dr Parsons and the PICU physician team and endorsed by related specialties within ACH. While these original guidelines focused on care in the PICU, they pertained to acute pediatric care in general and became widely used by multiple teams within the hospital. Thus in 2022 the website was rebuilt and launched in its current form to allow for document development, classification and use by other Specialty areas.

The ACH PCCG is now managed by a broad-based PCCG Committee that assigns authorship, approves postings and reviews concerns and ensures topics are updated regularly. The principal authors are noted in the footer of all document pages, as is the ‘last updated’ date.

Of note the levels of evidence for each document are not always classified, but all key references that the recommendations are based on are noted. This is simply because it is impossible to develop such a wide array of guidelines with perfect rigor, and still have them produced within a reasonable time and maintained them up to date. However, links to more rigorously produced guidelines are incorporated whenever they exist.

Guideline development and updates are continual, and some significant topics remain outstanding. The ACH PCCG team warmly invites contributions from all medical professionals and encourages those who are interested to take on authorship opportunities and ownership of topic areas. This could involve the creation of new guidelines or updates to existing ones, as needed. Please contact Written Contributions to find out about authorship opportunities with ACH PCCG.