Minor Head Injury Triage and Advice for Children

Minor head injuries are a common and significant concern in pediatric healthcare, accounting for a substantial proportion of emergency department visits. These injuries, typically characterized by a Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score of 14 or 15, often result from blunt trauma and carry the potential for complications such as traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in a small subset of cases (Kim et al., 2020; Pava et al., 2022). Notably, over 90% of pediatric head injuries fall into the minor category, reflecting the high prevalence of such incidents (Hermann et al., 2011).

Children, particularly those under two years of age, have unique anatomical and physiological characteristics that necessitate careful evaluation to balance the risks of over-intervention against the potential for missed diagnoses (Stone et al., 2019). Clinical decision-making in these cases requires a nuanced approach to differentiate benign injuries from those with the potential for significant intracranial complications.

To aid in this differentiation, various clinical decision rules, including the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) guidelines, have been established (Dowd, 2018; Osmond et al., 2010). These guidelines stratify risk and help clinicians decide when imaging, such as computed tomography (CT), is warranted. While CT scans are highly sensitive for detecting intracranial...