Background And Objectives: Children hospitalized with a mental health crisis often receive pharmacologic restraint for management of acute agitation. We examined associations between pharmacologic restraint use and race and ethnicity among children admitted for mental health conditions to acute care nonpsychiatric children's hospitals.
Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study of children (aged 5-≤18 years) admitted for a primary mental health condition from 2018 to 2022 at 41 US children's hospitals.
We examined associations between a validated, multidimensional measure of social determinants of health and population-based hospitalization rates among children <18 years across 18 states from the 2017 Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project State Inpatient Databases and the US Census. The exposure was ZIP code-level Child Opportunity Index (COI), a composite measure of neighborhood resources and conditions that matter for children's health. The cohort included 614,823 hospitalizations among a population of 29,244,065 children (21.
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