Profile of Medico-Legal Cases in Accident & Emergency Department of SSKH, LHMC, New Delhi During Pre-Covid-19 and Covid-19 Periods

Abstract

Medico-legal cases presented to the Accident & Emergency department vary from hospital to hospital. Profiling these cases from time to time provides an insight into the workload of medico-legal cases as well as what is going on in and around the locality. The present study was conducted at LHMC, New Delhi from January 2021 to June 2022 from the available records of MLCs from 1st January 2019 to 31st December 2021. Out of a total of 5702 MLCs, males were 85.77%. Victims of the age group 21–30 years formed the majority (36.30%) of the cases followed by age groups 31–40 years (25.44%). The time of incidence was between 6 p.m. and 11.59 p.m. in the majority (42.00%) cases. The time of reporting was between 6 p.m. and 11.59 p.m. in the majority (40.05%) of cases. A majority (56.92%) of the victims had reported within 1 hour of the incident. The cause was blunt force trauma in more than half (51.05%) cases, followed by RTA (17.93%) and poisoning (17.84%). In more than half (56.51%) cases, the manner was homicidal, followed by accidental including RTA (23.95%) and suicidal (19.35%). The surgery department was found involved in more than 2/3 (69.15%) cases, followed by Orthopaedics (31.85%), Medicine (20.199%) and ENT (19.52%). In 85.50% of cases, the victims were discharged within 24 hours. Hospital death in MLCs was 4.15% whereas 1.87% of victims were referred to other hospitals for further management.