Pediatric Surgical Admissions and Their Outcomes at Adama Hospital Medical College: A Facility Based Cross Sectional Study

Pediatric surgical admissions dramatically increased throughout the world as a result of increased trauma, emergency diseases and survival of congenital diseases. So, Facility based cross sectional study was conducted to identify the common pediatric (Age ≤ 15 years) surgical admissions and their outcomes at Adama Hospital Medical College. All admitted surgical patients from Jun 1, 2014 to June 30, 2015 were included in the study. Data abstraction tool was constructed to retrieve information from charts. Data was entered to SPSS version 20. Descriptive and analytic studies were performed. P value ≤ 0.05 with 95% confidence interval (CI) was used to interpret the findings. The mean age of study participants was 6 years ± 4.5 SD. Males were 276 (71.9%) making male to female ratio of 2.5:1. Gastrointestinal conditions (33.8%) were commonest causes of admissions followed by trauma (25.5%) and congenital anomalies (19%). There were five deaths resulting in a mortality rate of 1.3%. Factors associated with death were: delay in presentation, prolonged length of stay in hospital and delay in intervention. Shorter time of presentation to intervention (< 6 hrs) was found to be significantly associated with the favorable outcomes [Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR): 36.4, 95% CI: 3.7, 38]. Those who stayed < 7 days in the hospital were more likely to have favorable outcome (AOR: 1.7, 95% CI: 1.6, 16.8) compared to their counterparts. Delayed intervention, prolonged hospital stay and trauma are independent predictors of patient outcomes. Death in Pediatric patients with surgical conditions can be averted by avoiding these delays. Efforts to shorten length of stay in the hospital could also improve patient outcomes.