Prevalence of road traffic injury and its associated factors at hospitals in Wolaita Zone

Abstract

Background Road traffic injury is defined as fatal or non-fatal cases incurred as a result of road traffic crashes. It accounts for an estimated 1.2 million people death and as many as 50 million injury in each year worldwide. This study was aimed to determine prevalence and associated risk factors of road traffic injury.Objective To determine the prevalence and its associated risk factors of road traffic injury.Method Facility based cross-sectional study with sample size of 309 was used for conducting study in two selected hospitals in Wolaita Zone.Systematic sampling method was applied to select study subject based on inclusion criteria. Data was collected by questionnaires which was developed from reviewing different literatures and analysed by using SPSS version 20statistical software.Result Among the total of trauma victims who visited emergency department of hospitals, approximately half of victims (49.2%) were due to road traffic injury followed by falling injury 60 (19.4%) and burns 35 (11.3%). After adjusting for confounding in multivariate logistic regression analysis, sex and living places are independent factors of road traffic injury. Two of them are highly significantly associated with road traffic injury and being male and urban resident had thirteen times AOR 13.08 95% CI (6.15-27.85) and more than two times AOR 2.69 95%CI (1.55-4.64) increased odd of road traffic injury respectively.Conclusion Road traffic injury was leading injury types among trauma victims visiting emergency department of Hospitals. Therefore, strong road safety policy at local and country level is needed to reduce vulnerability of individuals and vehicle related injury.