Deficits in planned hospital care for vulnerable adolescents in England during the COVID-19 pandemic: analysis of linked administrative data
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Abstract
Planned hospital care (outpatient attendances and planned hospital admissions) was disrupted during the pandemic, but we lack evidence on which groups of young people were most impacted. We aimed to describe differences in planned care for vulnerable adolescents receiving children’s social care (CSC) services or special educational needs (SEN) support during the pandemic, relative to their peers. Using the ECHILD Database (linked de-identified administrative health, education and social care records for all children in England), we examined changes in planned hospital care from 23 March to 31 December 2020 for secondary school pupils in Years 7 to 11 (N=3,030,235). There were large deficits in planned care for adolescents overall, which disproportionately affected the 21% receiving SEN support or CSC services who bore 25% of the outpatient attendance deficit and 37% of the planned admissions deficit. These findings indicate a need for targeted ‘catch-up’ funding and resources, particularly for vulnerable groups.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.29.21266996: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:A limitation of this analysis is that it only looked at deficits in planned hospital care during the first nine months of the pandemic as experienced by young people aged 11 to 16 years, focusing on those whose vulnerabilities could be readily defined from …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.29.21266996: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:A limitation of this analysis is that it only looked at deficits in planned hospital care during the first nine months of the pandemic as experienced by young people aged 11 to 16 years, focusing on those whose vulnerabilities could be readily defined from administrative education and social care data. The true extent of the deficits in planned hospital care that occurred among all vulnerable children and young people throughout the course of the pandemic will be much greater than our estimates.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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