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Access to paediatric emergency departments in Italy: a comparison between immigrant and Italian patients

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to investigate whether access to paediatric emergency departments differed between foreign and Italian patients. METHODS: We performed a cross-sectional study between January-December 2007 to analyse attendance's characteristics in the paediatric emergency de...

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Autores principales: Grassino, Erica Clara, Guidi, Carla, Monzani, Alice, Di Pietro, Pasquale, Bona, Gianni
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2009
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2687543/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19490660
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1824-7288-35-3
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author Grassino, Erica Clara
Guidi, Carla
Monzani, Alice
Di Pietro, Pasquale
Bona, Gianni
author_facet Grassino, Erica Clara
Guidi, Carla
Monzani, Alice
Di Pietro, Pasquale
Bona, Gianni
author_sort Grassino, Erica Clara
collection PubMed
description OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to investigate whether access to paediatric emergency departments differed between foreign and Italian patients. METHODS: We performed a cross-sectional study between January-December 2007 to analyse attendance's characteristics in the paediatric emergency departments of ten Italian public hospitals. The study population included each foreign patient and the following Italian patient admitted to the same emergency department. All causes of admission of these subjects were evaluated, together with the child's age, gender, country of birth, parents' nationality, time of admission, severity code and discharge-related circumstances. RESULTS: We enrolled 4874 patients, 2437 foreign (M:F = 1409:1028) and 2437 Italian ones (M:F = 1368:1069). Most of foreign and Italian patients' admissions were sorted as green (72.5% and 87.8%, respectively) or white codes (25.2% and 9.8%, respectively). The most frequent causes for attendance concerned respiratory tract diseases, followed by gastroenteric ones and injuries in both groups. CONCLUSION: In our survey immigrants didn't access to emergency departments more than Italian children. Both of them referred to emergency departments mainly for semi-urgent or non-urgent problems. Foreign and Italian patients suffered from the same pathologies. Infectious diseases traditionally thought to be a potential problem in immigrant populations actually seem to be quite infrequent.
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spelling pubmed-26875432009-05-30 Access to paediatric emergency departments in Italy: a comparison between immigrant and Italian patients Grassino, Erica Clara Guidi, Carla Monzani, Alice Di Pietro, Pasquale Bona, Gianni Ital J Pediatr Research OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to investigate whether access to paediatric emergency departments differed between foreign and Italian patients. METHODS: We performed a cross-sectional study between January-December 2007 to analyse attendance's characteristics in the paediatric emergency departments of ten Italian public hospitals. The study population included each foreign patient and the following Italian patient admitted to the same emergency department. All causes of admission of these subjects were evaluated, together with the child's age, gender, country of birth, parents' nationality, time of admission, severity code and discharge-related circumstances. RESULTS: We enrolled 4874 patients, 2437 foreign (M:F = 1409:1028) and 2437 Italian ones (M:F = 1368:1069). Most of foreign and Italian patients' admissions were sorted as green (72.5% and 87.8%, respectively) or white codes (25.2% and 9.8%, respectively). The most frequent causes for attendance concerned respiratory tract diseases, followed by gastroenteric ones and injuries in both groups. CONCLUSION: In our survey immigrants didn't access to emergency departments more than Italian children. Both of them referred to emergency departments mainly for semi-urgent or non-urgent problems. Foreign and Italian patients suffered from the same pathologies. Infectious diseases traditionally thought to be a potential problem in immigrant populations actually seem to be quite infrequent. BioMed Central 2009-02-22 /pmc/articles/PMC2687543/ /pubmed/19490660 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1824-7288-35-3 Text en Copyright © 2009 Grassino et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research
Grassino, Erica Clara
Guidi, Carla
Monzani, Alice
Di Pietro, Pasquale
Bona, Gianni
Access to paediatric emergency departments in Italy: a comparison between immigrant and Italian patients
title Access to paediatric emergency departments in Italy: a comparison between immigrant and Italian patients
title_full Access to paediatric emergency departments in Italy: a comparison between immigrant and Italian patients
title_fullStr Access to paediatric emergency departments in Italy: a comparison between immigrant and Italian patients
title_full_unstemmed Access to paediatric emergency departments in Italy: a comparison between immigrant and Italian patients
title_short Access to paediatric emergency departments in Italy: a comparison between immigrant and Italian patients
title_sort access to paediatric emergency departments in italy: a comparison between immigrant and italian patients
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2687543/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19490660
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1824-7288-35-3
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