Axios - Hospitals are closing unprofitable pediatric units and eliminating some surgical services for kids as they grapple with lower Medicaid reimbursements, staffing issues and more complicated cases, a 20-year review in the journal Pediatrics found.
The cuts can erect additional hurdles to getting care in already underserved communities and require families to travel longer distances to regional or urban health centers.
The review of nearly 4,000 facilities from 2003 to 2022 found the proportion of hospitals that researchers identified as having the lowest capabilities for pediatric care more than doubled.
- The most common services shed were appendectomies (50.5% fewer hospitals), hospitalizations for pneumonia (42.3%) and asthma hospitalizations (41.1%).
- In contrast, capabilities like organ transplantation and open-heart surgery for congenital defects showed little to no change.
Hospitalizations for children fell 26% from 2000 to 2019, prompting more hospital operators to take pediatric inpatient units offline, with little incentive to bring them back.
- The resulting regionalization of pediatric care "has not shown signs of slowing, and it remains to be seen whether there is a floor on pediatric capacity," they wrote.
The lack of pediatric inpatient beds doesn't mean that a hospital will not admit a child on an adult ward. Share this
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