Study: health equity an important aspect of improving quality of care provided to children in emergency departments

Sept. 27, 2023
New study.

A new multi-site study led by Indiana University School of Medicine found increasing pediatric readiness in emergency departments reduces, but does not eliminate, racial and ethnic disparities in children and adolescents with acute medical emergencies.

The study also involved researchers from Oregon Health and Science University and UC Davis Health. They recently published their findings in JAMA Network Open.

“We believe that treatment protocols help to overcome biases and racism because if a child meets criteria, then we do one thing or another,” said Peter Jenkins, MD, associate professor surgery at IU School of Medicine and first author of the study. “We saw that for kids with traumatic injuries, whose care is largely determined by such protocols, there weren’t significant differences in survival based on race and ethnicity. But for children with medical emergencies, where treatment protocols are often lacking, we found significant disparities in mortality between Black and White kids. Importantly, the higher the level of readiness of the ED, the lower the level of disparity between racial and ethnic groups.”

Researchers looked at 633,536 pediatric patients at hospitals in 11 states from 2012-2017, making this one of the largest studies of racial and ethnic disparities among children to date.

Indiana University release on Newswise