Prevalence and factors associated with prolonged length of stay at pediatric emergency department, Southwest Ethiopia: A cross-sectional study

Background

Prolonged stay in the pediatric emergency department negatively affects patient outcomes and increases the risk of nosocomial infections, morbidity, and mortality. There is limited information on the length of stay in pediatric emergency departments in Ethiopia. Therefore, this study aimed to assess the prevalence and factors associated with length of stay among pediatric patients who visited the emergency department of Jimma Medical Center (JMC).

Methods

An institution-based cross-sectional study with 464 participants selected through systematic random sampling. Data were entered into Epidata version 4.6 and exported to SPSS version 26.0 for analysis. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression were used to identify factors associated with length of stay at a significance level with a 95 % confidence interval.

Results

The extent of prolonged stay was 61.90 % (95 % CI, 57.5–66.4). Patients triaged as red (AOR, 2.67; 95 % CI, 1.37–5.22) and yellow (AOR, 3.91; 95 % CI, 2.25–6.77), those arriving at night (AOR, 2.32; 95 % CI, 1.08–5.01), not having health insurance (AOR, 1.92; 95 % CI, 1.18–3.13), those who did not receive all prescribed drugs from the hospital pharmacy (AOR, 4.17; 95 % CI, 2.49–6.95), and patients with preexisting comorbidities (AOR, 2.05; 95 % CI, 1.12–3.78) showed significant associations with prolonged stay in the pediatric emergency department.

Conclusion

Most of the patients had prolonged lengths of stay in the pediatric emergency department of the JMC. It was significantly associated with the classification as red or yellow, without health insurance, arriving at night, having preexisting comorbidities, requesting imaging tests, and not getting all prescribed drugs from the hospital pharmacy.