Razi Journal of Medical Sciences

  Background and Aim: Urologic infections are common infections, among which pyelonephritis is the most common. Only in United States of America they cause more than 1.1 million patient referral annually. Treatment costs for these infections are about 180 million dollars a year. Although mortality and morbidity caused by theses diseases are high, but the treatment, if done on time, is not hard and could prevent from irreversible complications such as chronic renal failure and scar.

  The aim of this study was to identify the reasons of delayed referral and underlying risk factors for this delay in children with urinary tract infection, in order to find a solution and decrease the associated complications and cost fees.

  Patients and Methods: This study is a case series study. Our target groups were children with urinary tract infections that had referred to Sina and Bahrami Hospitals. Inclusion criteria included: 1- age between 1-10 years, 2- no functional complications of urinary tract, 3- a positive urine culture.

  Then questioned variants (age, sex, pathogen, etc) were gathered and later analyzed and the results were reported. To analyze our data we used SPSS V. 11.5. Descriptive data were shown as mean and standard deviation. To compare the data we used Chi² and t test. p= 0.05 was considered as meaningful.

  Results: Among our 185 patients with age range of 1 to 10 years (mean age of 5.4 yr), 57% were females and 43% were male. Meanwhile 15.9% of our patients had referred to hospital with symptoms of sepsis and 2.2% with septic shock. Our results did not suggest sex as a risk factor for referral delay. We observed that 2.2% of the children in our study were hospitalized with septic shock. Other results are shown in tables.

  Conclusion: Generally, the most useful method in preventing referral delays of children to hospitals and care centers are parental and prenatal education, education through mass media and informing them of the complications due to referral delay of a simple infections such as UTI.These methods can easily lessen the number of referral delay among children and thus decrease the complications and hospital costs.