Resumé
Background: Emergency Departments (EDs) receive
a variety of patients with different exigent and
challenging health conditions. This almost always
puts the staff within the department under intense
pressure which could adversely affect proper
documentations and record keeping. To this end, we
conducted a one-year (01 January to 31 December,
2019) review of ED patient case records.
Objective: The objectives of the study were to
determine the pattern of presentation and missing
diagnoses on patients’ case records at the ED.
Methods: A retrospective review of records of all
patients who presented at the ED within the period
of study was done. Data for the review included
demography and diagnosis by attending emergency
physicians. All cases in which a diagnosis was not
recorded in the ED treatment card were categorized
under missing a diagnosis and those with percentages
less than 0.1 were grouped as other diagnoses.
Results: A total of 9,880 patients were attended to in
- About half (4,868/9880, 49.3%) were males
while (4,987/9880, 50.5%) were females with a small
number without gender specified (25/9880, 0.2%).
The median age of the patients was 38 years with
inter-quartile range of 27 to 54 years. Medical
emergencies were the leading types of emergencies
(5737/9880, 58.1%) followed by surgical
emergencies (3047/9880, 30.8%). The five leading
diagnoses were cardiovascular diseases (1057/9880,
10.7%), Road Traffic Accidents (951/9880, 9.6%),
Malaria (802/9880, 8.1%), Head Injury (408/9880,
4.1%) and Fractures (408/9880, 4.1%). A high
percentage of missing a diagnosis (1260/9880,
12.8%) was recorded.
Conclusion: Our study revealed a high number of
diverse cases at the ED from January to December,
- The largest proportion of patients was in the
age group of 21 to 40 years (40.9%). Medical
emergencies were the commonest (58.4%)
presentation, with cardiovascular emergencies
predominating. A proportion (1260/9880, 12.9%)
of the documentation was missing a diagnosis. There
is the need to improve on the accuracy of
documentation and efficiency delivery in the
Emergency Department. It is also a pointer to the
need to rapidly scale up the current deployment of
electronic medical records systems in the hospital.
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