Objectives

Trauma is the second cause of death after cardiovascular diseases and the leading cause of wasting active years of life in the Iranian population. Trauma is one of the main causes of hospitalization, death, and short-term and long-term disability in the first five decades of life. Considering the few studies and the inconsistencies in the results of studies on the length of hospitalization of traumatized pediatrics in the emergency department and the resulting complications, we decided to investigate the most important factors related to the length of hospitalization in the emergency department and the resulting complications in traumatized pediatrics referred to an adult trauma center in west of Iran.

Method

In this retrospective study, all children aged under 12 years admitted to the emergency department from 2020 to 2021 were included. Demographic data including age, sex, time of trauma, place of residence, mechanism of trauma, length of stay, location of injury, inpatient department, undergoing surgery, complications of hospitalization, final outcome after hospitalization were extracted from patient data file. For data analysis, frequency and percentage were utilized for qualitative variables, whereas mean and standard deviation were employed for quantitative variables. The length of hospitalization for traumatized children was shown to be correlated with several characteristics, which were found by multivariate regression analysis and correlation coefficient tests on the data.

Result

400 children were included in this study. The average age was 8.07 ± 3.99 years, 78.78% were male and 22.21% were female. 2% of children died during the study period. The average length of stay in the emergency department was 3.15 days. Older age, male gender, motor vehicle collisions, limb injuries and hospital infections caused a longer stay in the emergency room (p≤0.05). Finally, patients who had a longer length of stay in the emergency department) 2.8%) had a more mortality in comparison to patients with a short-timed stay (1.7%), (p<0.05).

Conclusions

This study determined that age, sex, mechanism of injury, hospital infection, type of injury can lead to a longer stay in the emergency department so by removing modifiable risk factors this issue could be addressed.