Disparities among pediatric hospital admissions according to gender
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18203/issn.2454-2156.IntJSciRep20202642Keywords:
Gender disparity, Pediatric admissions, Male to female pre-dominanceAbstract
Background: The objective of the study was to determine the pattern of disparities among paediatric hospital admissions according to gender.
Methods: This retrospective observational study was done at pediatric ward of Al-Tibri Medical College and Hospital Karachi from June 2018 to May 2019. Pediatric patients below 12 years of age admitted to the pediatric ward of the hospital were included while patients who were admitted for less than 24 hours, refused for consent by parent/guardian, surgical or ICU pediatric patients were excluded. SPSS was used for data analysis. Quantitative data included age, gender, diagnosis and seasonal variation, expressed as frequency in percentages and chi-square test was applied to test for significance.
Results: Among 734 pediatric hospital admissions, 423 (58%) were males and 311 (42%) females. Highest percentages of pediatric admission in both genders were infants after which second most patients were from the 1-4 years group in both genders (p=0.01). 215 patients of acute gastroenteritis were male while 142 females. Among patients admitted with respiratory disease, 56 were males while 48 were females. 52 male patients were admitted with viral fever while 34 patients admitted were females (p=0.01).
Conclusions: Our study reported a significant difference among gender variances in pediatric hospital admissions. Overall, not only males were predominant in admission to pediatric wards, they were also found to be predominant in disease categorization. Further studies set to determine the reasons behind such gender differences would help in determining plans accordingly to improve outcome of diseases.
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