Determining Length of Stay and its Associated Factors in the Emergency Department of Karat Primary Hospital, Konso, SNNPR, Ethiopia

Abstract

Background፤ The emergency department is an important part of a hospital as this department is one of the points of hospital entrance for patients, a place where life threatening and serious problems are dealt with. Prolonged ED length of stay is not only a cause but also a result of emergency department crowding, yielding a vicious cycle. The emergency department length of stay has significant correlation with factors that contribute to overcrowding in the emergency department. The objective of this study was to determine length of stay of patients and its contributing factors in the emergency department of karat primary hospital. Method: Facility based cross-sectional study was employed to collect data from 297 patients. The study used systematic random sampling by observing the natural journey of every third patient from time of arrival to exit from emergency department in which first comer was the first to be observed at the beginning of data collection. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 20.0. Bi-variate analysis was done and variables with p-value less than 0.25 were included in multiple logistic regressions analysis. Result: The mean length of stay of Karat primary hospital emergency department was found to be 311.4 (SD=256.2) minutes which is 5.2 (SD=4.27) hours. Boarding ( AOR=4.4 CI (2.4, 8.0)), the treatment service within the emergency department (( AOR= 5, CI(2.7, 9.4)), radiology service (( AOR= 5.91, CI (3.1, 11.2)) and laboratory test (( AOR= 3.2, CI (1.76-5.98)) significantly affected the emergency department length of stay of Karat primary hospital. Conclusion and Recommendation The emergency department length of stay in Karat primary hospital was found to be long. The main factors that contributed to the prolonged stay in the hospital were then analyzed and treatment service within the emergency department, radiology tests, boarding and laboratory tests were finally found to be the most significant factors that contributed to this prolonged length of stay. Karat primary hospital management has to improve emergency department service by investing on ways to identify reasons and ways to reduce boarding time, the laboratory waiting time, has to work hard on ways to fasten the emergency department treatment services and radiologic investigations so as to improve the standard of care in the department. Finally since this research identified factors that contributed to the overall length of stay but did not deeply searched for the reasons of delay of the main factors, other researchers are recommended to do so.