An analysis of admission patterns into the Intensive care unit at the Kenyatta National Hospital over a ten year period

Abstract

Kenyatta National Hospital is a 2000-bed capacity hospital that serves as the Kenyan National Referral Hospital and also receives referrals from within the East African region. The study concentrates on the coding of reasons for all the admitted cases despite their admission physiological scores and goes ahead and evaluates them as the objectives. It does not delve into the criteria and scoring systems of admission to ICU. A systematic method of recording the reasons for admission to the ICU is central to the analysis, interpretation and comparison of mortality and morbidity data collected in different units. This thus serves as an audit of how the KNH ICU is doing in comparison to others. The method developed and tested by the ICNARC aimed at coding the reasons of admission into the ICU/HDU, the primary requirement being that it added explanatory power when attempting to estimate the probability of hospital death after discharge from the ICU/HDU. The ICNARC method used in this study was able to code for all randomly selected patients up to 5 tiers.