Pediatric Burn Unit Admission is Associated with School Holidays and Lower Home Childhood Opportunity Level

Burn injury can have profound detrimental effects on the quality of life and mental health of children. We collected demographics, burn etiology, burn date, and home zip code for pediatric patients admitted to our burn unit from 2016 to 2023. Age, burn date, and etiology of burn were used to assess temporal and mechanistic patterns of injury for preschool-age and school-age children. Home zip code was used to determine each child's home Childhood Opportunity Index (COI) score, which is composed of subdomains for Education, Health and Environment, and Social and Economic. We calculated the odds ratio for odds of pediatric burn admission for each COI subdomain quintile, using very high opportunity neighborhoods as the reference. Scald was the prevailing burn etiology (64%). In school-age children, July was the month with the most burn injuries (19%), attributable to firework injuries. School-age children were also more likely to be injured in a week without classroom instruction (P < .001). There was a dose-response relationship between COI and odds of burn admission, with the greatest odds of burn admission observed for children from very low educational opportunity areas (OR 5.21, 95% CI 3.67-7.39). These findings support interventions for burn prevention such as increased education about the dangers of fireworks, addressing inequities in access to childcare and extracurricular activities, and reducing the default water heater temperatures in multi-unit dwellings.