Understanding the causes of inpatient mortality in hospitals is important for monitoring the population health and evidence-based planning for curative and public health care. Dearth of information on causes and trends of hospital mortality in most countries of Sub-Saharan Africa has resulted to wide use of model-based estimation methods which are characterized by estimation errors. This retrospective analysis used primary data to determine the cause-specific mortality patterns among inpatient hospital deaths in Tanzania from — The analysis was carried out from July to December and involved 39 hospitals in Tanzania.
A review of hospital in-patient death registers and report forms was done to cover a period of 10 years. Information collected included demographic characteristics of the deceased and immediate underlying cause of death. Causes of death were coded using international classification of diseases ICD Data were analysed to provide information on cause-specific, trends and distribution of death by demographic and geographical characteristics.
A total of , deaths were captured over a year period. The median age at death was 30 years, interquartile range IQR 1, The five leading causes of death were malaria Death among children under 5 years has shown an increasing trend.
The observed trends in mortality indicates that the country is lagging behind towards attaining the global and national goals for sustainable development. The increasing pattern of respiratory diseases, cancers and septicaemia requires immediate attention of the health system.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The request to share data used in this manuscript may be sent to Prof. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
