CNN
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Emergency department visits and revisits in children’s hospitals that are related to mental health are “increasing rapidly,” a new study suggests.
Between 2015 and 2020, mental health visits in pediatric emergency departments increased by 8% annually, with about 13% of those patients revisiting within six months, according to the study published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. Whereas, all other emergency department visits increased by 1.5% annually.
Mental health revisits increased by 6.3% annually, but in general, the percentage of mental health visits that had a subsequent revisit remained stable, “which may reflect that the factors associated with revisit did not change substantially during the study period, even as the pediatric mental health crisis worsened,” wrote the researchers, from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the University of Southern California and Boston Children’s Hospital.
“However, the significant increase in the raw number of revisits is still concerning,” the researchers added in their study.
The study findings suggest that pediatric mental health emergency department visits and revisits are both climbing, “and identifying patients at high risk of revisit provides an opportunity for tailored interventions to improve mental health care delivery.”
The new study included data on more than 200,000 patients seen at 38 children’s hospitals across the United States between October 1, 2015 and February 29, 2020. The data came from the Pediatric Health Information System, an administrative database of children’s hospitals.
The researchers examined how many visits included diagnoses of mental health disorders or intentional self-harm. They also analyzed mental health revisits, meaning a patient visited the emergency department again within six months of their initial visit.
The ongoing surge in pediatric mental health emergency department visits may be associated with “a combination of factors, including a worsening crisis of pediatric mental illness and shortage of mental health clinicians,”