Profile of the children's emergency service in the Rancagua Regional Hospital, 2002-2003

Abstract

This study serves the purpose of contributing to the management of the medical network of the Sixth Region Health Service through acquaintance whit the characteristics and relevance of the Children's Emergency Service health care in the Rancagua Regional Hospital, by means of the following objectives: a) Ascertaining the volume of Emergency Service visits of children under 15; b) Identifying the characteristics of the consulting population in the variables of age, sex, commune of residence; c) Assessing the monthly distribution of visits and determining if there is seasonality; d) Identifying the cause of the visit declared by the parents and relating it to pertinence, using as an approximation to pertinence or seriousness of the condition, the decision of hospitalization; e) Being informed of the destination of patients that are being derived from other establishments of the regional medical network to the base hospital, by means of intrahospital consultations. This is a descriptive study of the emergency visits of minors under I 5 years of age during the years 2002 and 2003 to the Emergency Service of the Roncagua Regional Hospital.

The main cause for visits is fever in 29.72% of pediatric visits and in children's surgical visits the most frequent reason for consulting is contusion of upper extremity (21.6%). There exists a great number of visits derived from primary attention and which required no hospitalization; it is therefore deemed that in the majority of cases these must have been resolved at that level of attention, since we cannot disregard the importance of certain consultations which, although urgent, are not serious, such as epistaxis, which has not been considered.