Flight Nurse Specialist Carolyn Nieman receives 2005 Barbara Hess Award
 Carolyn Nieman, MSN, APRN-BC, CFRN, has received the 2005 Barbara Hess Award from the Association of Air Medical Services for her contribution to research and education within the air medical arena. The award will be officially presented to her at this year’s Air Medical Transport Conference in Austin, Texas (October 24-26).
Ms. Nieman is a Flight Nurse Specialist for Metro Life Flight and a lecturer at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. As a graduate student at Case in 2003, she received recognition for her research poster entitled “Use of the Broselow Tape May Under-Resuscitate Children.” Broselow Tape is a tool for determining the correct dosage of medications and equipment sizes (endotracheal tubes, suction catheters, etc.) for children, based on their length, and it is traditionally used in emergency medical situations involving children who require resuscitation. Ms. Nieman, while watching her thirteen-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son perform at a school concert, realized that Broselow Tape may underestimate children’s size. Therefore, she began devising a way to improve on the “Broselow Tape” method. “I always thought my kids were normal size, but that night they seemed so much smaller than everyone else on stage,” she says. “So when I came to work, I started thinking there’s no way that the Broselow Tape can be accurate anymore, and it became more clear to me everywhere I went that kids seemed bigger and bigger.”
Ms. Nieman enlisted the help of other flight nurses, including Lisa Lorenz and Harry Rees, to research the current accuracy of the Broselow Tape, which, according to her, had never been validated in a pediatric population. The team worked to correlate the device against a large sample of children, ages 5 to 11, from several schools in the greater Cleveland area, as well as from the MetroHealth System’s database of child measurements from birth to age 11 that were taken during annual well-child visits. Based on this data, Ms. Nieman’s team concluded that less than half of all pediatric patients today receive an accurate dosage estimate based on the Broselow system, especially children who are older or heavier. “We want to get the word out to people in emergency medical systems, fire departments, emergency rooms, and so on, so they can determine what they want to do with the information,” Ms. Nieman says. She is currently working with her research team to complete their research and disseminate the results.
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