Black children in the US are twice as likely to die from certain emergency surgeries as white children.
Brittany Willer at Nationwide Children鈥檚 Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and her colleagues looked at US data on paediatric surgeries between 2012 and 2017 consisting of over 270,000 children who underwent surgery, of whom 10,425 had to have a second emergency operation, or unplanned reoperation. The team chose this data set to look for racial disparities among children who have surgical complications.
They split the children into four risk groups 鈥� low, intermediate low, intermediate high, and high 鈥� depending on their surgical histories and what disease they had. The team found that high risk black children were twice as likely to die from unplanned reoperations as white children, while black children in the intermediate risk groups were 1.9 times as likely to die. There was no difference in low risk groups.
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鈥淚t is well-known that African-Americans have poorer surgical outcomes than whites,鈥� says Willer. 鈥淚t is likely due to a complex interaction of factors such as social determinants of health, access to high quality speciality care and implicit biases.鈥�
She believes her findings suggest that healthcare workers should be more attentive when treating minority children. 鈥淗ealthcare teams need to have an awareness of this increased risk that an African-American child has and maintain vigilance in every aspect of their care,鈥� said Willer, who presented the work at a on 3 October.
鈥淭hese findings are no surprise as black-white racial disparities have been historically persistent for every age group,鈥� says Gwenetta Curry at the University of Edinburgh, UK. 鈥淧revious research has shown that black children are less likely to receive pain medication for the same injury as their white counterparts.鈥�
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