Children visiting the emergency department (ED) for mental health crises during the pandemic had longer stays and more severe diagnoses, according to a new study in Academic Emergency Medicine.
The study was based on ED visits to nine US hospitals participating in the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network Registry from 2017 to 2022.
The authors looked at four periods: pre-pandemic (January 2017 through February 2020), early pandemic (March through December 2020), 2021, and 2022, and calculated rate ratios (RRs) of observed to expected visits per 30 days during each pandemic time period.
Overall, there were 175,979 mental health ED visits by children during the study period. Most (70.4%) of visits were by adolescents 12 to 18 years old, 52.4% by females, 51.8% by non-Hispanic White children.