Prognosis in children with traumatic injuries referring to the emergency department

PURPOSE: Trauma may lead to serious complications in children patients. The purpose of this study was to investigate prognosis in children with traumatic injuries. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted on all of the children (<18 years old) who had suffered traumatic injuries and transferred to the emergency department of Imam Hussein Hospital by emergency medical services. After selecting the children, a checklist including information such as demographic characteristics, trauma type, consciousness level, and final outcome was recorded. Finally, the data were analyzed using t-test, Chi-square test and ANOVA. RESULTS: In total of 564 children were investigated. Among them, 70% were males, and 33.2% were in the age range of 5–12 years. The mechanism of injuries in 97.9% of the cases was blunt trauma. The most common chief complaint among the affected children was nausea. The majority of them had stable vital signs and normal neurological tests results. However, 1.06% of them died during hospitalization. The results indicated that the final outcome in the children affected by traumatic injuries is significantly related to the type of trauma, the location of traumatic event, the vehicle used to transport them to emergency departments and their Glasgow coma scale score (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION: Considering the young age of the child patients and over half of trauma happened at home, it is important to raise parents' awareness about the risky places and activities, which were likely to result in traumatic injuries for children.