LAUSR

Traumatic injuries are the leading cause of hospitalization in Sri Lanka for last three decades. Accident and Orthopaedic Service (AOS) of National Hospital of Sri Lanka (NHSL) is the main trauma care center in the country. Annually around 50 000 injured patients are admitted to AOS. An electronic trauma bank was developed and implemented at AOS in 2016. We conducted this study with the objective of assessing the usefulness of the trauma bank in anlysing patterns and trends of the injuries admitted to AOS. We extracted trauma bank data of all the patients admitted with injuries to the AOS from January to December 2017. In total, there were 52 980 recorded admissions. We analyzed data using Microsoft Excel. Of all the admissions, 93.2% (n=48,864) reported unintentional injuries. Injuries due to violence were reported by 7.1%. Around two third of the patients were male (66.9%). While 37.4% of the injuries occurred at homes, 23.6% happened on road/rail roads. Several victims were travelling (17.6%), working (16.7%), or engaging in leisure activities (8.7%) at the time of injury. Majority of unintentional injuries were due to falls (38.8%). Of them, 90.0% were falls from the same level and 10.0% were falls from heights. Majority of falls victims were male (53.8%). Of all the injuries, 19.8% were transport injuries. Of them, 44.4% involved motorcycles, 16.8% involved three-wheelers, and 2.2% involved foot cycles. Almost half of the victims of road traffic crashes were drivers or riders (47.1%) and 15.1% were pedestrians. The trauma bank facilitated the easy extraction of injury data for analysis. The findings showed that traumatic injuries are a major health problem in the country. Trauma registries are useful in extracting and analyzing injury patterns, causative factors and trends. It is recommended to strength the trauma registries in the country.