Injuries/Violence
Risk factors for the most common pediatric unintentional injury admissions in a rural district hospital- Botswana Keneilwe Motlhatlhedi* John Holmes Keneilwe Motlhatlhedi Billy Morara Tsima Dawei Xie Douglas Wiebe
Introduction. Unintentional child injuries are an important and preventable cause of child morbidity and mortality. We aimed to determine previously unknown risk factors for common unintentional injury admissions in a district hospital in Botswana in order to identify possible targets for future injury prevention strategies.
Methods. We conducted a cross-sectional study of children aged 6 months to 13 years admitted between 2018-2021 with an injury-related diagnosis. We characterized the injuries by frequency. The independent variables of interest were child gender, age, month of injury and maternal employment. Multivariate logistic regression was used to determine the adjusted odds of injury.
Results. Of the 637 children included in the study, 403 (63.27%) were male, the median age was 3.9 years (IQR 0.23-7.31). As shown in Figure 1, the most common injuries were poisoning 208(32.6%), falls 170 (26.8%), and burns 71 (11.2%). These three mechanisms were significantly more prevalent in males and in those younger than 5 years. The odds of having one of the three most common injuries was 40% lower with increasing age group while controlling for gender, month, mother’s employment status, and primary caregiver, aOR 0.61 (95% CI 0.51-0.73).
Discussion. Younger age groups were significantly associated with higher incidence of poisoning, falls, and burns in this study population. The child’s gender, mother’s employment, and month of the year were not significantly associated with mechanism of injury.
Conclusion and recommendations. This is the first study of childhood injury frequency and risk in northwest Botswana. Several injury types predominated, all of which are potential candidates for preventive measures. Unintentional injury prevention efforts in this study population should target poisoning, falls, and burns in children younger than 5 years.
