Acute Intoxication in Pediatric Emergency Department: A 12 Months Survey

Background: Acute intoxication (AI) is a major risk of morbidity and mortality among pediatric population, especially in toddlers. Small literature on the modality of admission to the emergency department (ED) following AI and outcome management is available.

Objective: To assess the epidemiology of first evaluation following AI in a third level pediatric ED.

Methods: We retrospectively reviewed medical record of all children aged 0-16 years admitted to ED for AI. Patients evaluated from April 1, 2016 to March 31, 2017 to the pediatric ED of University Hospital of Udine were enrolled. Admissions for foreign body ingestion were excluded. For each patient we collected: gender, age, date and time of admission, access modality, triage code, discharge code and eventual hospital admission, substance category.

Results: Patients evaluated for AI were 73 among a total of 14795 ED admission. Male were 52.1%. Median age was 21 months (IQR 14-57). Of the evaluated children 65.7% were

Conclusions: Ours results reflect literature data, adding lacking information especially about our region. We found of interest that despite AI scares healthcare professionals, no red code were assigned, neither in the two cases that need ICU admission.