The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on pediatric emergency department visits
| Date |
|---|
2020-10-16 |
no. 1521/#2290
Poster viewing - 16-19 October
Authors whose abstracts were accepted will be published in the digital abstract book in journal Frontiers in Pediatrics
ISBN: 978-2-88966-540-2
Background. The issue of overcrowded pediatric emergency department (PED) is well known in many countries and is associated with delayed care, higher mortality rate and stressful working conditions. COVID-19 pandemic made a huge impact of people’s lives including their health related habits. Our aim of the present study was to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on trends of the tertiary level PED visits in Kaunas, Lithuania. Methods. This was a retrospective observational study using medical record databases from the largest PED in Lithuania for years 2019 through 2020. We analysed rates of visits, triage categories, admissions, epidemiological characteristics of patients before and during the lockdown and compared them to the visits of the same period in 2019. Results. PED visits fell from 2343 visits in February to 1407 in March and then to 918 in April, 1342 in May. We observed that during March, April and May 2020 compared to the same period of the previous year there was a significant drop in the number of visits to our PED: from 8443 to 3667 corresponding to the overall reduction of 57.9 %. Out of all conditions, only cases of traumas remained stable throughout the months. There were no additional complications due to the delays in the patients being seen.
Conclusions. These data reveal that the COVID-19 pandemic had a strong influence on PED visits by reducing number of visits. The majority of conditions that we routinely deal with appear to be treatable in settings other than urgent care.