The direct hospitalisation costs of paediatric scalds: 2-Year results of a prospective case series
Section snippets
Patients and treatments
We conducted a prospective case series observation from January 2005 to December 2006 at the Burn Center, Changhai Hospital, Shanghai, China. Paediatric patients were admitted according to the following criteria:
- (a)
>5%TBSA (total burn surface area),
- (b)
deep second-degree burns and/or third-degree burns,
- (c)
burns with complications (wound inflammation, infection, shock, combined injury, poisoning and inhalation injury), and
- (d)
burns to specialist areas (face, hands, feet, perineum and major joints).
All the
Sociodemographic and clinical characteristics
During the study period, 178 patients aged 0–14 years were admitted to the Burn Center; of these, 71.91% (128 of the 178) suffered from acute burn injury, and 88.28% (113 of the 128) of the acute burn injuries were scalds; there were no cases of mortality before discharge. Of the 113 patients included, 55.75% were boys and 44.25% were girls (male/female ratio was 1.26:1), the distribution of age (mean ± standard deviation (S.D.): 4.08 ± 2.56, median age: 3 years and range: 2–13 years)) and total
Discussion
In this study, we analysed the paediatric scalds data from our department and described the characteristics of their LOS and hospitalisation costs and the factors that impacted them. In this case series, we had found that patients aged 3 years or less accounted for more than half of the total LOS and total hospitalisation costs, patients with burn area less than 10%TBSA accounted for more than 70% of the total LOS and more than half of the total hospitalisation costs, and patients with
Acknowledgements
We thank the nursing team of the Burn Center and staff members of Department of Information for their help with data collection, and thank professor Zhang Luo-Man for his advice on statistics.
Source of funding: This work was financially supported by Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30730091), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30571921) and special funds from Shanghai Health Bureau (No. 05III007).
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These authors contributed equally to this work.