Retrospective Evaluation of Cases Accepted by Inter-hospital Transfer to the Pediatric Emergency Clinic

Introduction: Inter-hospital transport is an important process of pediatric emergency and pediatric intensive care; the patient is transferred to another center with the emergency medical services. Inter-hospital transport can be life-saving for pediatric patients, but the process can logistically be difficult and risky. The actions required to prevent unwanted events during transport depend mostly on the accurate and reliable data obtained. We think that research on the transport of pediatric patients is limited in our country. Our study investigated the characteristics of pediatric patients transferred to our unit by ambulance and the problems during transport.Methods: One hundred and eighty-three patients under the age of 18 who were referred to the pediatric emergency service between June 2017 and June 2019, whose data were regularly recorded, were included in our study. Data of patients who were sent to the external center for consultation via 112 were excluded. The list of the transferred patients was obtained from 112 command centers in our city and the patient records were analyzed retrospectively with the hospital information management system.Results: Fifty-nine percent of the 183 patients included in our study were male. The mean age of the patients was 62.2 +/- 39.1 months. Fourty-two percent of the patients were between 1 month and 3 years old. We found that the most frequent transports are in the spring with 42.6% and 50.9% of the transports took place between 16.00-00.00 hours. We found that the most common transported patients were pneumonia with 28.4% and respiratory distress was the most common adverse event during transport with 7.1%.Conclusion: In the transfer of pediatric patients between hospitals, every step, from the training of staff to the equipment in the ambulance, should be planned in detail. We believe that more studies are needed to examine transport protocols for children's emergency medical services, the level of education required by the transport team, the state of the medical device used in the transport process, the patient's pre and posttransport stability, and the safety of the patient during the transport period.