Introduction
Injury has been reported as the leading cause of death for children and accounted for the death of 950,000 children under the age of 18 years annually. Majority of the injury incidents and deaths were preventable and higher survival outcomes can be achieved by improving trauma care quality. It would be essential to gain deeper understanding into epidemiological factors of pediatric trauma to develop injury prevention strategies and upgrade pre-hospital, in-hospital trauma care. While there are many studies about epidemiology, health care practice of pediatric injuries, few of them are responsible for Asian countries. The Pan-Asian Trauma Outcomes Study (PATOS) proposed in 2013, is a standardized, international, multicenter registry of trauma across the Asia Pacific region. PATOS registered collective data an injury epidemiology, health care process, and outcomes from emergency department of participating hospitals of 15 Asian countries. The objective of this study is to give an overview of the state of pediatric injury across Asia-Pacific countries, and to describe the characteristics and outcomes of the pediatric injury using PATOS data.
Material & Method
This study is a retrospective analysis of PATOS study data from January 2015 to November 2018. PATOS is a prospective, observational, multicenter study among 15 countries of Asia-Pacific region. PATOS study enrolled injured patients who are transported via typical EMS ambulances or other various vehicles to emergency departments (EDs) of participating hospitals. In this study all children and adolescents less than 18 years of age were included. Data were analyzed by the countries and age group.
Result
Five countries were analyzed in our study. A total of 7,696 children and adolescent less than 18years with injury were included in the study. There were 879 patients aged <2years (infant), 1,679 aged 2 to 5years (young child), 1,581 aged 6 to 11years (child), and 3,527 aged 12 to 17years (adolescent). 73.8% of the patients had been discharged from ED, 21.8% were admitted to ward, and 2.6% were transferred to the other hospital.
Conclusion
This first multi-center study involving five countries from Asia-pacific region has identified the epidemiological features of pediatric trauma and related characteristics among countries and provided information on pediatric trauma epidemiology to guide future research.