Abstract
Morbidity and mortality data are important for planning and implementing healthcare strategies of a country. To understand the major causes for hospitalizations in rural Bangladesh, demographic and clinical data were collected from the hospital-records of five government-run rural health facilities (upazila health complexes) situated at different geographical regions of the country from January 1997 to December 2001. During this period, 75,598 hospital admissions in total were recorded, of which 54% were for male, and 46% were for female. Of all the admissions, diarrhoeal disease was the leading cause for hospitalization (25.1%), followed by injuries (17.7%), respiratory tract diseases (12.6%), diseases of the gastrointestinal tract (10.5%), obstetric and gynaecological causes (8.5%), and febrile illnesses (6.7%). A considerable proportion (8.3%) of the hospitalized patients remained undiagnosed. Despite the limitations of hospital-based data, this paper gives a reasonable insight of the important causes for hospitalizations in upazila health complexes that may guide the policy-makers in strengthening and prioritizing the healthcare needs at the upazila level in Bangladesh.
Highlights
The health status of people of a nation is reflected by their morbidity and mortality patterns
The findings showed that diarrhoeal diseases continue to be the leading cause for hospitalizations in rural areas; watery diarrhoea and acute respiratory infection (ARI) were the two major causes for hospitalizations in children aged less than five years; injuries requiring hospitalizations have become a major public-health concern, especially among the adult rural population; and a high proportion of hospitalized patients remains undiagnosed
We have shown that assaults were the leading cause (69%) for hospitalization due to injuries
Summary
The health status of people of a nation is reflected by their morbidity and mortality patterns. The information is important for planning and implementing healthcare strategies and for monitoring healthcare services of the country [1,2,3]. Accurate population-based morbidity data are largely deficient or absent [4]. The country is inhabited by nearly 125 million people [5] and is divided into 507 administrative units called upazila (subdistrict), with an average population of ~200,000 in each subdistrict [6]. More than 80% of the people of Bangladesh live in rural areas [5]
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