Child Opportunity Index Disparities in Pediatric Surgical Encounters During the Coronavirus 2019 Pandemic.

Objective: Surgical encounters decreased during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and may have been deferred more in children with impeded health care access related to social/community risk factors. We compared surgery trends before and during the pandemic by Child Opportunity Index (COI).

Methods: Retrospective analysis of 321,998 elective surgical encounters of children ages 0-to-18 years in 44 US children's hospitals from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2021. We used auto-regression to compare observed versus predicted encounters by month in 2020-21, modeled from 2017 to 2019 trends. Encounters were compared by COI score (very low, low, moderate, high, very high) based on education, health/environment, and social/economic attributes of the zip code from the children's home residence.

Results: Most surgeries were on the musculoskeletal (28.1%), ear/nose/pharynx (17.1%), cardiovascular (15.1%), and digestive (9.1%) systems; 20.6% of encounters were for children with very low COI, 20.8% low COI, 19.8% moderate COI, 18.6% high COI, and 20.1% very high COI. Reductions in observed volume of 2020-21 surgeries compared with predicted varied significantly by COI, ranging from -11.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] -14.1%, -8.7%) for very low COI to -2.6% (95%CI -3.9%, 0.7%) for high COI. Variation by COI emerged in June 2020, as the volume of elective surgery encounters neared baseline. For 12 of the next 18 months, the reduction in volume of elective surgery encounters was the greatest in children with very low COI.

Conclusions: Children from very low COI zip codes experienced the greatest reduction in elective surgery encounters during early COVID-19 without a subsequent increase in encounters over time to counterbalance the reduction.