Adecuación de estancias e ingresos en un hospital pediátrico

Foundation and objective: The constant increase of the welfare demand in the departments of general hospitalization and. Materials and methods: Transverse descriptive study with analytical components. The unit of analysis was a day of hospitalization (05/13/2007) before the reports of discharge of the general emergency unit of the infantile hospital La Fe during the third week of October 2007, to those to whom the pediatric version of the protocol of adequacy of admissions and stays (Pediatric Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol) PAEP was applied. Results: The inadequacy of admissions was of 10.5%. The percentage of inadequacy of stays was of 18.4 %. The more frequent reason of inadequacy of admissions was "the diagnostic and therapeutic needs can be conducted as external patient". The most frequent reason of inadequacy of stays was "problems of programming test or surgical procedures". Discussion: We confirm the hypothesis of the existence of unnecessary hospitalization in pediatrics. The percentage of inadequate admissions and stays was similar to that of other studies. The procotol PAEP turned out to be an easy to use instrument. The knowledge of the risk factors for inadequate admissions and stays will allow us to introduce correcting measures to optimize the use of the hospital pediatric resources in environment.