Demographic Characteristics and Treatment Costs of Immigrant Patients in the Pediatric Emergency Department

Objective: After the war in Syria, it is planned to investigate the refugee children’s (from diffrent counties coming to Turkey), emergency service admission features and evaluating outpatient and inpatient costs. Material and Methods: Demographic, clinical characteristics and treatment costs of asylum seekers who applied to our pediatric emergency department from March 2011 to March 2016, the period of the civil war in Syria, were examined retrospectively. Results: During the study period, 7551 (1.3%) of the 569.540 applications for emergency services were asylum seekers and the total number of patients was 1740. Of the 1740 patients who received one of the recurrent referrals; 975 were Syrian (56.0%), 474 were Iraqi (24.4%) and 341 were Afghan (19.6%). 1005 of the cases were male and the mean age was 59.16 ± 59.27 months (0- 17year 1 month). The most frequent admission reasons were respiratory system complaints (50.2%), gastrointestinal system complaints (34.7%) and fever (31.6%). 129 of the patients had an underlying disease (7.4%). At least one test was done in all cases. 60.7% of the patients were diagnosed with infection-related disease. These were URTI, AGE, tonsillitis, bronchiolitis, pneumonia and otitis respectively. In other cases, consultation was requested in 255 cases (14.7%). 182 (10.1%) of the patients were followed up with emergency observation. Mean observation time was 21.3±17.4 hours (1-94 hours). The average outpatient clinic cost was 83.19 TL and the emergency hospital cost was 1288.89 TL for one patient. Conclusion: It was seen that the most frequent cause of emergency admission in asylum seekers was infection related diseases. Bad living conditions and nutritional deficiencies can be the reason. This explains the recurrent emergency department visits. It has been determined that interpreters are required to deal with patients, that the examination time is longer than the other patients and that increase the costs associated with these patient