343 LUPA – a Pilot Project During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we look at healthcare management and had a great impact in the social dynamics related to disease awareness and search for acute care. During the initial lockdown, we implemented a pilot project in the emergency department (ER) that consisted on a telephonic line named Linha de Urgencia Pediatrica de Apoio (LUPA), run by interns, to who parents could call when their kids had acute disease.The goal of this study is to identify the contribution of this project to avoid unnecessary admissions in the ER during this pandemic period and to assess the effectively needed admissions.We overviewed, restrospectively, the records of all phone calls received between March and October 2020 and ran a frequency analysis of the results.During the defined time period, we received 288 phone calls, equally distributed between Monday to Sunday and 9am to 9pm. Mothers accounted for 90% of the callers.From the total amount of patients, 54% were females with a median age of 20 months and a median time of illness of 2 days. The most frequent reasons for calling LUPA were fever (35%), cutaneous alterations (18%) and cough (8%). Fever was predominantly associated with diarrhea (18%) but in 29% of cases was the only reported symptom. Active surveillance of warning signs at home was the most chosen conduct, in 71% of cases. Admission to the ER was advised in 26% of cases.LUPA was a usefull resource during the COVID 19 pandemic and helped managing benign and self-limited conditions, which are frequent in pediatric acute care.