{"doi":"10.1002/jhm.13528","title":"International Networks for Pediatric Inpatient Research and Excellence (INSPIRE): A global initiative in pediatric hospital medicine","abstract":"Pediatric hospital medicine (PHM) has emerged as one of the fastest-growing pediatric subspecialties.1, 2 Internationally, PHM is most established in the United States, with fellowship training and accreditation as a board-certified specialty, while in other countries (e.g., Australia), core pediatric training includes competencies focused on hospital medicine. Training, accreditation, inpatient staffing models, and the use of the terms “hospital medicine” and “hospitalist” differ across countries, but there is universal recognition of the expertise required to provide care in this setting.3 While the clinical expertise is well established, including its growing importance with the rise in complexity of children managed in hospital,4 PHM is underdeveloped as an academic field. Less than one-third (30.9%) of PHM clinicians have protected time for research, compared to 52.6% for other pediatric subspecialties, and less than 4% spend >25% time on research.1 Researchers in other pediatric subspecialties have developed national networks to build academic capacity with the aim of improving quality of care and reducing unwarranted variation. Pediatric networks in emergency medicine,5 oncology,6 and critical care7 have focused on conducting multicenter studies, in particular, high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on important clinical questions.8-10 Learning from the success and impact of other pediatric research networks, the past decade has seen the emergence of several PHM national and regional research networks focused on generating evidence to improve quality of care and outcomes for hospitalized children and youth. The objective of this perspective article is to describe the development of an international network of networks focused on PHM research called INSPIRE—the International Networks for Pediatric Inpatient Research and Excellence (www.inspire-global.net). Launched in 2001, the US Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) Network is the earliest PHM research network.11 Following a rapid growth and development of the field of PHM in the United States, PRIS was redesigned in 2009 and led by a group of hospitalist investigators focused on multicentre research. PRIS also envisioned strong international collaborations, leading to United States–Canadian partnership on multicenter prospective observational studies (e.g., the I-PASS handoff program),12 using administrative databases,13 and inclusion of Canadian sites in surveys (e.g., pulse oximetry in bronchiolitis),14 and more recently collaborations with Australian researchers in hybrid-effectiveness trials. This foundational work from PRIS inspired the launch of PHM networks in other regions in the past decade. Networks now include the General and Adolescent Paediatric Research in the United Kingdom and Ireland (GAPRUKI—https://bagp.org.uk/gapruki/) in 2016; the Children's Inpatient Research Collaboration of Australia and New Zealand (CIRCAN—https://circan.org/) in 2018, and the Canadian Paediatric Inpatient Research Network (PIRN—https://www.pirncanada.com/) in 2019. Table 1 outlines the characteristics of the four currently established pediatric research networks focused on inpatient hospital care. The practice context across the four networks vary with respect to medical training, hospital medicine accreditation as a specialty, inpatient staffing models, and healthcare insurance coverage. Beginning in 2019, there were out-reach efforts made across the networks to arrange quarterly calls to share updates, discuss challenges, and identify opportunities for international collaborations. Building on the foundational work in PRIS,15 each of the three newly established networks focused early work on prioritization studies, including those of parents and families,16 clinicians,17 researchers, and health system impact.18, 19 These meetings also created opportunities to collaborate on workshop submissions to Pediatric Academic Society (PAS) meetings, invitations to","journal":"Journal of Hospital Medicine","year":2024,"id":460288,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9462,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":650081,"name":"Sunitha V. Kaiser","orcid":"0000-0002-9862-9362","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":748423,"name":"Amanda Ullman","orcid":"0000-0001-8860-5319","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":851615,"name":"Katrina Cathie","orcid":"0000-0001-5074-0769","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":439536,"name":"Katherine A. Auger","orcid":"0000-0002-7970-5999","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":796616,"name":"Sarah McNab","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":246941,"name":"Richard McGee","orcid":"0000-0002-3125-8253","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":580553,"name":"Louisa Pollock","orcid":"0000-0002-4240-325X","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1178481,"name":"Damian Roland","orcid":"0000-0001-9334-5144","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1221649,"name":"Francine Buchanan","orcid":"0000-0002-6579-2489","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":650082,"name":"Sanjay Mahant","orcid":"0000-0003-0487-5835","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":650079,"name":"Peter J. Gill","orcid":"0000-0002-6253-1312","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":35,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:04:03.568045Z","pmid":"39439042","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}