Treatment Outcomes and Associated Factors Among Road Traffic Accident Victims in Public Hospitals of the East Wollega Zone, Western Ethiopia.

Background: In 2018, the World Health Organization reported that deaths from road traffic crashes have increased to 1.35 million a year. The treatment outcomes related to road traffic accidents were carried out in those admitted at the emergency OPD, and other studies did not address factors such as investigation, management, or time between admission and initiation of care. Hence, this study assessed treatment outcomes and their associated factors among road traffic victims in East Wollega hospitals. Western Ethiopia. Methods: A cross-sectional study design was used. The study was carried out from March 15 to April 15, 2020, in five hospitals of East Wollega. A computer-generated simple random sampling technique was used to select the study participants. The data were collected retrospectively from registries and patient charts of road traffic injury victims who attended the hospital in 2019 by the help of an abstracted format, then finally the data were cleaned and entered into Epi-Info version 8 and exported to SPSS version 24 for analysis. Bivariate and multivariable binary logistic regression analyses were performed. Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR) with 95% CI was used to identify factors associated with road traffic victims. Those variables with p-value ≤ 0.25 in bivariable analysis were analysed by multivariate logistic to control the confounding. Variables having p-values <0.05 in the multivariate logistic regression were considered significantly associated. Results: A total of 490 road traffic accident victims were studied of which 41(8.4%) Road Traffic Accident victims died during treatment, and 449 (91.6%) survived. RTA victims came by police car (AOR=18.59, 95% CI: 1.15, 29.49), victims came by other transportation (private car, public transport) (98.7%) die than those came by ambulance (AOR=0.013, 95% CI: 0.002, 0.957), having co-morbidity (AOR=14.00, 95% CI: 1.22, 21.11), head injury (AOR= 8.77, 95% CI: 2.35, 15.44), B/P (AOR=20.32,95% CI: 1.37, 30.58) and trunk injury (AOR= 6.86, 95% CI: 1.38, 14.93) were significantly associated with road traffic victims’ treatment outcome. On the other hand, victims who stayed in the hospital more than 1 week were less likely to die than those who stayed for less than one week (AOR=0.003, 95% CI: 001, 0.48). Conclusion: The road traffic accident was a major public health problem, with which mortality rate was 8.4%. Type of transportation, having comorbidity, type of injury, and length of hospital stay were significantly associated with the treatment outcomes.