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. 2013 Feb 13:346:f866.
doi: 10.1136/bmj.f866.

Accuracy of the "traffic light" clinical decision rule for serious bacterial infections in young children with fever: a retrospective cohort study

Sukanya De  1 , Gabrielle J Williams, Andrew Hayen, Petra Macaskill, Mary McCaskill, David Isaacs, Jonathan C Craig
Affiliations

Accuracy of the "traffic light" clinical decision rule for serious bacterial infections in young children with fever: a retrospective cohort study

Sukanya De et al. BMJ. .

Abstract

Objectives: To determine the accuracy of a clinical decision rule (the traffic light system developed by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)) for detecting three common serious bacterial infections (urinary tract infection, pneumonia, and bacteraemia) in young febrile children.

Design: Retrospective analysis of data from a two year prospective cohort study

Setting: A paediatric emergency department.

Participants: 15,781 cases of children under 5 years of age presenting with a febrile illness.

Main outcome measures: Clinical features were used to categorise each febrile episodes as low, intermediate, or high probability of serious bacterial infection (green, amber, and red zones of the traffic light system); these results were checked (using standard radiological and microbiological tests) for each of the infections of interest and for any serious bacterial infection.

Results: After combination of the intermediate and high risk categories, the NICE traffic light system had a test sensitivity of 85.8% (95% confidence interval 83.6% to 87.7%) and specificity of 28.5% (27.8% to 29.3%) for the detection of any serious bacterial infection. Of the 1140 cases of serious bacterial infection, 157 (13.8%) were test negative (in the green zone), and, of these, 108 (68.8%) were urinary tract infections. Adding urine analysis (leucocyte esterase or nitrite positive), reported in 3653 (23.1%) episodes, to the traffic light system improved the test performance: sensitivity 92.1% (89.3% to 94.1%), specificity 22.3% (20.9% to 23.8%), and relative positive likelihood ratio 1.10 (1.06 to 1.14).

Conclusion: The NICE traffic light system failed to identify a substantial proportion of serious bacterial infections, particularly urinary tract infections. The addition of urine analysis significantly improved test sensitivity, making the traffic light system a more useful triage tool for the detection of serious bacterial infections in young febrile children.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf (available on request from the corresponding author) and declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.”.

Figures

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Fig 1 Patient flow chart
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Fig 2 Receiver operating characteristics curve for performance of the NICE traffic light system, with or without the addition of urine analysis, for detection of serious bacterial infections
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