High mortality rate of obstetric critically ill patients in Rwanda and its predictability

Abstract

Background Reasons for admission at the intensive care units (ICU) for obstetric patients vary from a setting to another. Outcomes from ICU and its prediction models are not well explored in Rwanda because of lack of appropriate scores. This study intended to assess profile and accuracy of predictive models for obstetric patients admitted in ICU in the two public tertiary hospitals in Rwanda.Methods We prospectively collected data from all obstetric patients admitted in the ICU of public referral hospitals in Rwanda from March 2017 to February 2018 to identify reasons for admissions and factors for prognosis. We analysed the accuracy of mortality prediction models including the quick Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (qSOFA) and Modified Early Obstetric Warning Score (MEOWS) by using the Logistic Regression and adjusted Receiver Operating characteristic (ROC) curves. Results Obstetric patients represented 12.8% of all ICU admissions and 1.8% of all deliveries. Sepsis (31.9%) and haemorrhage (25.5%) were the two commonest reasons for ICU admission in our study participants. The overall ICU mortality for our obstetric patients was 54.3% while the average length of stay was 6.6 days. MEOWS score was an independent predictor to mortality (adjusted OR=1.25[1.07-1.46]; p=0.005) and so was the qSOFA score (adjusted OR=2.81[1.25-6.30]; p=0.012). The adjusted Area Under the ROC (AUROC) for MEOWS was 0.773[0.666-0.880] and that of the qSOFA was 0.764[0.654-0.873] signing fair accuracies for ICU mortality prediction in these settings for both models.Conclusion Sepsis is the commonest reason for admissions to ICU for obstetric patients in Rwanda. Simple models comprising MEOWS and qSOFA could accurately predict the mortality for those patients but further larger studies are needed before generalization.