This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Few pediatric patients treated at pediatric trauma centers

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

Most injured children are not being treated at pediatric trauma centers, according to a recently presented study. The findings were shared by lead author Sage R. Myers, MD, at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Denver.

“Injury is the leading cause of death for children and, therefore, it is important for health care providers and researchers to focus on ways to optimize treatment of these injuries to ensure the best possible outcomes,” Myers stated in a press release. “Statewide trauma systems have been created to deliver appropriate care to those patients who require specialized services for injuries.”

Utilization of care

Myers and his colleagues utilized the Kids Inpatient Database (KID), merging the available list of all adult trauma centers by level along with a recently created list of all pediatric trauma centers by level to identify hospitals that are caring for injured children. Pediatric discharges with primary or secondary ICD-9 codes for injury were included in the analysis, according to the study abstract. The codes were also used to calculate injury severity for each discharge. Patients without valid mortality or injury severity data were excluded.

The investigators reportedly used descriptive analyses to evaluate proportions of injured children cared for by hospital type. Data collected was then weighted to reflect national estimates.

The national estimates created through the weighted data revealed 252,653 discharges for all pediatric trauma patients with 48,867 young patients — defined in the study as being 5 years of age or younger — and 27,601 severely injured patients.

The findings, Myers and his colleagues wrote, show that 73% of injured children are treated outside of pediatric trauma centers.

“Even amongst the most severely injured patients, nearly half are treated outside of level I pediatric trauma centers,” the authors wrote. Furthermore, the release noted, about 48% of patients relevant to the study were not treated at a level I pediatric trauma center.

“Our findings suggest that we have not yet perfected our system’s ability to send our most injured children to our most-equipped trauma centers,” Myers stated. “We need to figure out why it is that not all children are making it to where they need to be when they are seriously injured.”

Reference:

• Myers SR, Branas CC, Kallan MJ, et al. Who cares for our injured children? Presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies. Paper # 2906. April 30 – May 3. Denver.
• Disclosure: The authors have reported no relevant financial disclosures.

Follow OrthoSuperSite.com on Twitter