Authored by Guédéhoussou T*
Introduction
Any health worker who cares for children will be faced with medical emergencies. They are common and can start with alarming speed, but if treated quickly and effectively, it will have most of the time a positive result, or at least better than expected [1]. In sub-Saharan Africa, pediatric emergencies are often a matter of “disaster medicine” and several studies show the extreme gravity of the conditions seen in emergency consultations [2-5]. The mortality linked to these emergencies is significant: varying from 8% in Lomé in Togo to 14% in Ivory Coast [6,7]. The fight against child mortality must therefore go through a rapid diagnosis of pediatric emergencies and consequent treatment [8]. Thus, pediatric medical emergencies remain a daily reality, a real health problem and a concern with which all health personnel are confronted. In the Regional Hospital Center of Lomé - Commune (CHR-LC), being the youngest of the major reference hospitals in the city of Lomé, it was imperative, after six years of exercise, to establish the profile of the morbi - mortality of children consulting there, especially in a state of vital distress.
Materials and Method
Our study was carried out in the Paediatrics department of the Lomé-Commune regional hospital (CHR-LC). It is a secondary level hospital in the organization of the country’s health system, located in health district II of the Lomé - Commune region. This hospital was relocated in April 2010. Its Pediatrics department has 27 beds. This is a cross-sectional retrospective study. It covered the period from 1st January 2012 to 31st to Dec. 2017. The study focused on all records of children of both sexes of, under 15 years, received in the service in an emergency medical situation. We’re not included in the study patients presenting no threat to life and those with surgical emergencies. A pre-established and tested survey sheet was completed for each patient. The socio-demographic, clinical, paraclinical, therapeutic and evolutionary data were recorded. They were processed and analyzed using Epi Info 3.4.3 software. Pearson’s Chi-square test was used to compare the qualitative variables or the percentages, for a significance threshold p = 0.05.
Results
Sociodemographic characteristics
In total, 19,470 children were received in the consultation service during the study period. In all, 5,736 (29.5%) of these children were hospitalized, including 3,300 in an emergency department. These emergencies therefore represented 16.9% of consultations and 57.5% of hospitalizations. Two thousand and forty patients were included in the study. The M/F sex ratio was 1.4. The average age of our patients was 54.3 months (extremes 0 day and 180 months). Children under 5 years old accounted for 73.2% and 0 to 29 days 11.2% (Figure 1).
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