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[4 MIN READ]

Child physical abuse exists in all corners of the country and affects children of all ages, ethnicities, and socioeconomic groups.

Consider the following facts:

• More than 2 million reports of suspected child maltreatment are investigated each year in the United States. These reported cases represent only a fraction of the abuse that children experience.
• Child maltreatment includes neglect and abuse that may be physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological.
• There are more than 650,000 substantiated cases of child maltreatment annually.
• About 18% of child maltreatment involves physical abuse.
• More than 1,500 children die each year due to abuse or neglect. 80% of these deaths are children under 4 years old.
• The incidence of child abuse is underestimated since 17% of adults in the U.S. report that they were physically abused as a child.

Infants and children with acute abdominal pain present to emergency departments, urgent care centers and physician offices with a variety of signs and symptoms. Since infants can’t localize pain and pre-school children are often imprecise in their responses, the healthcare practitioner may find it difficult to ascertain the actual dilemma. 

Accurate triage of patients in an emergency department is critical to timely care and patient safety. 

Read these four clinical tips for triage nurses based on recent trends spotted by RSQ® Collaborative Triage Champion, Shelley Cohen, RN, MSN, CEN. 

Download these tips as a PDF.

It should be no mystery to anyone that EDs see more than their share of fireworks injuries on July 4th and hangovers on New Year’s Day. But what about on Halloween? Will there be a deluge of patients with candy overdoses? Since I couldn’t recall any specific cases from my own Halloween emergency department shifts, I did a casual search and found a few interesting trends.

The temperatures are rising, and school sports are starting long practices in all kinds of weather. During intense exercise, people can lose up to 1.5 liters of fluid per hour. Summer is prime time for pediatric patients to sustain heat-related illnesses, and these patients may present to the emergency department in some distress.

The practice of pediatrics is relatively unique from a risk management perspective. One study placed the risks associated with the practice of pediatrics relative to other specialties as 25^th out of 26 specialties with regard to the risk of being sued. However, although the risk of being sued is relatively low, another study found that the risk that a pediatrician may be sued in a given year was 3.1% as compared with 7.4% for all physicians.