Abstract:
Back ground: Data regarding length of hospital stay (LOS) are paramount to evaluate
efficiency and quality of surgical care as well as for rational resource utilization, allocation,
and administration. Thus, length of hospital stay have been used as a surrogate indicator of
satisfactory treatment outcome and efficient utilization of resources for a given health
institution. However, there was a scarcity of data regarding these issues in Ethiopia.
Objectives: To assess length of hospital stay and its predictors among adult patients admitted
for laparotomy procedure at the surgical ward of public hospitals in west shewa zone,
Oromia, Ethiopia, 2022 G.C
Methods: Facility-based prospective cohort study was conducted for two consecutive
months. Samples of 292 adult patients hospitalized with laparotomy procedure at surgical
ward of public hospital in west shewa zone were participated in the study. The first analysis
was descriptive statistics (median, range, and percentile) to examine the proportion of
participants who responded. Cox proportional hazard regression was used to show an
association between length of hospital stay and its associates in bivariable and multivariable
analysis. Hazard ratio with its 95% confidence interval was used as measure of association.
P-value <0.05 was used to declare statistical significant association.
Results: From 299 proposed participants, samples of 292 patients participated in the study
with response rate of 97.6 %. This study revealed that, the rate of discharge in the patients
with age greater than 60 is 0.5 times (AHR: 0.5, 95% CI, 0.3- 0.82) as compared to patients
with age category of 18-40. Study subjects with chronic diseases had longer length of
hospital stay(AHR: 0.83,95%CI,0.54- 0.95),as compared to patients without chronic diseases.
Conclusion: In this study, the incidence rate of discharge was 17.1 per 100 (95% CI 15.2,
19.3) patient days‟ observation. The median time to discharge was 5 days with IQR of 3 days.
age greater than 60, presence of chronic diseases, presence of surgical site infection, presence
of pressure ulcer, exposure to poly pharmacy and exposure to hemodynamic complication
during surgery, were found to be predictors of time from hospital admission to discharge.
Local health care workers, hospital administrators, local health planners, zone health officers,
and other stakeholders are expected to use the finding of this study as baseline information
for planning and implementation of interventions.
