When comparing the months of February and March in 2019 and 2020, the DGH saw PED attendances decrease by 5.6% and 30.4%, respectively, and the CH decreases of 0.6% in February 2020 and 33.8% in March. The decrease in attendances among CYP has accelerated since the ‘UK lockdown’ announcement of 23 March 2020. The question is, therefore, where have all the children gone? The reasons that they are not attending (or, in most cases, being brought) are almost certainly a complex reflection of the changing behaviours and concerns of their parents and carers in a pandemic situation, but the real concern is that they remain at home, some of them with very important and serious pathology that can (and needs to) be treated. Additionally, the current social distancing measures mean that children living in difficult circumstances have reduced access to the safety net of regular contact with education, health and social care professionals. This may have an impact on the number of vulnerable children experiencing neglect or maltreatment, in the same way increases in domestic violence are being reported in media around the world. While CYP—by virtue of their apparently less serious clinical course—may be relatively invisible within the current pandemic, this has wide ranging implications and warrants further investigation. While we have presented here a very limited initial analysis of an emerging dataset, we would encourage colleagues around the world to capture information around their own patterns of attendance and reflect (and then act) on the wider implications of what they find.
Language: en
", language="en", issn="0003-9888", doi="10.1136/archdischild-2020-319385", url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2020-319385" }