Mortality Pattern in Intensive Care Unit: Experience at Abakaliki Southeastern Nigeria

Abstract

Background: An intensive care unit (ICU) is a special unit of a hospital that provides intensive treatment for patients with severe or life-threatening illnesses and injuries, which require constant care and close monitoring with life support equipment. The mortality rate is still very high in most ICUs especially in the developing countries due to late presentation of patients, unavailability of well trained staff and lack of life support equipment. There has not been any previous study on the mortality pattern in ICU of Alex Ekwueme Federal University Teaching Hospital Abakaliki (AEFUTHA). It is against this background that we embarked on this retrospective descriptive hospital based study of the mortality pattern in ICU of a Tertiary Hospital in Abakaliki, South-eastern Nigeria. Method: This is a retrospective descriptive hospital based study. The admission and discharge registers of the ICU ward were used to extract information on biodata, diagnosis, duration and outcome of all admissions from January to December 2019 (12 months). Results: A total of 174 (male 113, female 71) patients were admitted over the 12 months period with mean age of 46.31 ± 12.28 years. Seventy-one (40.8%) of the patients died from predominantly stroke, acute abdomen, trauma, sepsis, renal failure, acute diabetic complications and cancer in descending order. Acute diabetic complications had 100% case fatality rate, followed by stroke (71%), renal failure (62.5%), cancer (60%), sepsis (55.5%), acute abdomen (34%) and trauma (23%). The mean duration of ICU admission was 4.2 days for the non-survivors and 6.3 days for survivors. Conclusion: The ICU mortality rate was high and constituted of mainly stroke, acute abdomen and trauma which are essentially preventable. Female sex, medical diagnosis and ICU admission duration of less than 6 days were associated with higher ICU mortality.