Black children in the US more likely to die from surgery complications

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

Black children in the US are twice as likely to die from certain emergency surgeries as white children.

Brittany Willer at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and her colleagues looked at US data on paediatric surgeries between 2012 and 2017 consisting of over 270,000 children who underwent surgery, of whom 10,425 had to have a second emergency operation, or unplanned reoperation. The team chose this data set to look for racial disparities among children who have surgical complications. …