Outcome and Acute Care Hospital Costs After Warm Water Near Drowning in Children

Abstract

Individual outcome cannot be reliably predicted in the emergency department; therefore, aggressive resuscitation of near drowning victims should be performed. Decisions to subsequently withdraw life support should be made based on integration of likelihood of survival, high (but not absolute) certainty, and parental/societal issues. The vegetative patients are the most expensive to care for, while intact survivors are least expensive. Reduction of expenditures on patients likely to have vegetative or dead outcome would result in substantial savings, but loss of normal survivors.