Medical Support for Children's Mass Gatherings[1]
Summary
Prospective documentation of every patient contact at a television-sponsored children's fun fair attended by approximately 100,000 people. Of 192 patients treated across a nine-hour period, 85.4% had only minor injuries and were seen for under ten minutes. The most common complaint was minor trauma (53.6%), followed by minor medical problems such as headache or mild allergic reaction (10.9%), insect bites (10.4%), and serious medical problems or major trauma (9.9%). Four patients (2%) were transferred to hospital. Seventy-five percent of contacts occurred in the afternoon. The overall usage rate was 19.2 patient encounters per 10,000 spectators, and half of all patients were under 14 years of age. Twenty percent of all children up to age 10 who needed medical assistance were unaccompanied by an adult; the authors conclude that up to 33% of children seeking medical assistance may be unaccompanied.
So what
The unaccompanied-minor figure is the operational finding and it has no counterpart in US regulation. A fifth to a third of children presenting for care arrive without an adult, which creates a consent problem, an identification problem and a reunification problem at once, in a tent, at the busiest hour of the day. None of MGMI's 51 surveyed jurisdictions addresses any of the three; the Purple Guide does, via a Vulnerable Persons Policy and DBS clearance for child-facing staff. The 19.2 per 10,000 usage rate is the only pediatric presentation rate in the literature, and it comes from an event where children were the audience — it cannot be transferred to a general-admission event where they are a minority.
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- Publisher (DOI) ↗may be paywalled
- PubMed ↗abstract · free