Unidentified women in emergency services: care provided in public hospital emergency services.
Fernanda Coura Pena de Sousa, Fernanda Oliveira Santos, Giulia Mendes Curityba and 3 others
PMID 42659506WHAT IT FOUND
Unidentified women in a Brazilian ER were mostly young, mixed-race, and arrived with trauma or assault.
Many stayed anonymous, and only 37.9% were identified by hospital outcome; ER outcomes differed by identification status.
Key findings
01The most frequent triage priority was orange/very urgent, and the most common reason for attendance was assault.
02Only 37.9% of women were identified by the time of hospital outcome.
03Identification status was associated with the emergency room outcome.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study used records from one large public trauma hospital in Belo Horizonte, so the findings may not apply to other emergency services. It was retrospective and based on electronic records, with some clinical and social information in free text, which can be interpreted differently by different professionals. Important fields were often missing: age was recorded for 41.3% of women and place of residence for 43.1%. The final sample was only 58 women, and the identified and unidentified groups were small, so the outcome association should be read cautiously. The study did not test an identification intervention or randomise patients, so it cannot show that lack of identification caused the observed outcome differences.
Declared interests
The supplied text thanks Fundação Hospitalar do Estado de Minas Gerais for institutional co-participation in the study. It does not report a separate conflict of interest statement or commercial funding.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that lack of identification caused the outcome differences. This was a small retrospective record review of 58 women, and the groups were not randomly assigned; other differences in severity, violence context, or social support could explain the pattern.