ABSTRACT

This study aims to analyze the demographic features of the patients that visited pediatric emergency service and treated as a medicolegal case. This study, which was designed as a cross-sectional study, was performed with a retrospective scanning on the medicolegal case files of 2004. In 2004, 7922 patients visited pediatric emergency department in 2004 and 589 (7.4%) of them were treated as a medicolegal case. 355 (60.3%) of the cases were male and 227 (38.5%) were female and the difference between them was significant (p <0.001). The mean age was 69.0 ± 45.6 month (1-196 m). The most frequently encounte-red reason for the visits are falling down, intoxication or suspi-cion of intoxication, traffic accident, burns or penetration of an object to the body. The period of the year with highest preva-lence was summer and the period of lowest prevalence was au-tumn and the cases applied to the emergency service between 16.00 and 24.00 pm. 177 (30.1%) of the cases were discharged following treatment; 242 (41.1%) were hospitalized; 25 (4.2%) were referred to another hospital as there was no available ro-om in the hospital; 15% (2.5%) left the service with their own will and 3% left the hospital without the information of the hospital staff; 4 (0.7%) were dead when they were brought to the service and 2 (0.3%) died in the emergency service. Most of the medicolegal cases are caused by preventable accidents. Fa-milies and the society should be trained as it is possible to pre-vent the accidents. In addition, it is compulsory that each institution providing the service should keep its own records. The importance of recording cases is even more important when the subject is a medicolegal case.

Keywords: Child emergency, medicolegal case.