Irish children are four times more likely than the children of asylum seekers to have been referred by a GP to a hospital accident and emergency department, new research has found.
The finding comes from a study which looked at the attendances by children at the A&E unit of Galway's University College Hospital over a three-month period and it established that not alone were the children of asylum seekers less likely to have been seen by a GP before attending, they were also more likely to travel to the A&E unit by ambulance and were less likely to require admission.
The rate of admission to the paediatric ward from A&E was nearly half that in asylum-seeker children compared with Irish children, reflecting a less severe level of presenting illness.
The asylum-seeker children were also less likely to be registered with a GP than the Irish children; researchers say a language barrier may play a role in this.
The study is published in the latest edition of the Irish Medical Journal.
"At present, there appears to be greater dependence on paediatric hospital services over the family GP by asylum seekers when seeking medical advice for their children," it said. "Many of their presenting complaints could have been dealt with in a GP surgery setting," it added.
The study said that despite concerns that asylum-seeker children might be presenting with diseases and conditions which are considered rare in the local population, all presenting complaints among asylum-seeker children during the timeframe of this audit between January and March 2003 were similar to those of Irish children.
A total of 25 asylum-seeker children presented during the study period and they came mainly from Nigeria, but also from Romania, Ghana, Poland, Moldova, Congo, the Philippines, Zimbabwe and Russia.