A new study has revealed that a child’s neighborhood can influence how often they visit the local emergency room. While it is wonderful that there are emergency rooms for people to use when they have a life-threatening injury, or illness, it is not somewhere that anyone wants to be.
No parent wants to take their child to the emergency room, but there are always times when they need to. Whether their child has a high fever, or is ill, or they fall at the playground and have an injury that needs attending too, this is always a place that mom can go to make sure her child gets taken care of.
According to Medical Xpress, a study was done that showed which children are more at risk for visiting the ER room, and it turns out their neighborhood could play a big part. The study was done by the University of California, and it can be read in full here.
The study found that children who live in neighborhoods with greater hardships, such as “substandard housing,” or high pollution are more likely to use the emergency room. This also includes issues that could be resolved by their pediatricians instead.
There are always cases of health crisis’ coming to the ER when they could be treated by family doctors and pediatricians, and this results in longer wait times, and it is much more expensive.
This was the first study done that focused on the link between neighborhoods and emergency room visits, and they did this by looking at databases from 49 children’s hospitals in the US.
They looked at hospital visits in children up until 17 years old, and they used their Child Opportunity Index scores. These scores are a measure of neighborhood context that could influence a child’s development.
They found that the lower the score, the more the families were using the emergency room.
The researchers stated that by understanding these relationships, they can understand more how neighborhood impacts child development and health, and what the utilization is of healthcare facilities. It can help design policy and health care interventions which can work to improve the system for everyone.
One of the reasons these families rely on the ER room is that access to primary physicians is hard in these neighborhoods, and they need to work on improving them.
Sources: Medical Xpress, AAP