Survival after Admission to Emergency Room of Orthopedics Trauma in Patients at Suratthani Hospital during 2010-2018

Abstract

              Introduction : Patients entering emergency rooms of hospitals have usually suffered a serious traumatic event. In Thailand, deaths from traffic accidents are relatively high. Records are routinely kept containing data from hospital emergency rooms in hospitals. These data require appropriate statistical analysis so that management of such trauma patients can be improved.
              Objective To evaluate survival time until death after entry.
              Methodology : The survival time is simply the duration of follow-up, and the outcome is said to be censored. Due to such follow-up loss, a method is needed to avoid bias due to these censored survival times. A binary censoring status variable takes values 1 (outcome event occurred) or 0 (outcome unknown). Survival analysis uses the survival time and this censoring status. The survival curve is a graph showing an estimate of the probability that a subject survives at least for a specified duration t. The Kaplan-Meier curve is a nonparametric estimate of this survival curve. The log rank test gives a p-value for scientifically comparing survival curves for different groups of subjects.
              Result We see that subjects injured in traffic accidents survived approximately one hour longer than those injured from other causes. This result holds whether or not the disappeared group is included, but the median survival time is shorter when the disappeared group is omitted.
              Conclusion Our study raises more questions than it answers, because there is no information in the data about how long subjects survived after departing from the emergency room at the hospital. While such data could be obtained for subjects admitted to hospital, and it is also likely that discharged subjects are relatively healthy, nothing is known about those who went home or those lost to follow-up (“disappeared” subjects).