Social Disadvantage and Inequity in Access to Pediatric Critical Care Services for Children Living Remote from a Children's Hospital

Regionalization of health care has created geographical distance between pediatric specialty services and children, with the potential for disparities in access to care. We investigated the association of state-level area deprivation index (S-ADI), a measure of socioeconomic disadvantage, and characteristics and outcomes in a cohort of children requiring unplanned hospital transfer to a quaternary care pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). We conducted a single-center retrospective cohort study of children requiring unplanned hospital transfer to the PICU at the University of Virginia Children's Hospital from July 1, 2019 to December 31, 2020, excluding planned transfers, transfers from another intensive care unit, and patients whose address could not be associated with an S-ADI. We collected demographic and clinical data as well as the S-ADI, an ordinal variable ranging from 1 to 10 with 10 representing the most disadvantage. We observed no differences in S-ADI based on patient sex, age, history of chronic medical conditions, or need for a medical device (tracheostomy, home ventilator, surgical feeding tube, cerebrospinal fluid shunt). We also did not observe differences in PICU or hospital length of stay based on S-ADI. We did observe for every one-point increase in S-ADI there was an associated increase of 8.6 miles (p < 0.001) in patient travel distance. Among patients from a higher S-ADI area, we observed increased severity of illness on PICU admission (p = 0.02) and case fatality as compared with patients from a lower S-ADI area (11 vs. 1.9%, p = 0.038). Children traveling the farthest for subspeciality pediatric critical care at our hospital had higher measures of socioeconomic disadvantage and severity of illness.