Hospital mortality and associated factors of Road traffic accident victims admitted at the trauma centers in Ethiopia. Hospital based retrospective cross- sectional study

Abstract

Background About 1.35 million peoples deceased every year as a consequence of road traffic accidents (RTA). Half of all road traffic deaths occur among susceptible road users: walkers, bikers, and racers. 93% of the world's mortalities on the streets occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), although these nations have a small number of the world's vehicles. Ethiopia is a country with small number of vehicles and large number of death due to road traffic accident. This study aimed to assess mortality among admitted road traffic accident victims and factors determining it. Methods The study was conducted in Addis Ababa Burn and emergency trauma (AaBET), and Tikur Anbessa specialized hospital (TASH) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from March 13, 2021 to April 23, 2021. Hospital-based retrospective cross-sectional chart review methods were implemented from Dec 31st 2018 to January 1^st, 2021. 398 RTA victims were selected using simple random sampling method. Structured checklist was used to collect the data. The collected data was cleaned and entered into Epi-data ver.4.6 and exported to SPSS ver.26 for analysis. Binary logistic regression analyses were used to determine the association between variables. Result The study found that hospital mortality of road traffic accident victims admitted at AaBET and TASH in AA, Ethiopia, were 31.6% during the last two years. Among RTA victims who had severe head injury was more than 30 times (AOR = 30.79, 95%CL: 6.62, 143.25) likely to cause hospital mortality as compared to those who had a mild head injury. The hospital fatality of RTA victims who were admitted for ≥ 1 day more than 24 times (AOR = 24.88, 95%CI: 5.13, 114.37) likely to die as compared to those who had a length of hospital stay > 3days. Conclusion and Recommendation: This research clearly illustrates that the hospital mortality of RTA in the last 3 years was found to be high. The study revealed that head injury state severity, endotracheal intubation status, and length of hospital stay significantly determined hospital mortality of road traffic accidents.