If your loved one is admitted by any chance at a public hospital intensive care unit, the chances that he or she will survive are 50-50, survey has revealed.
A survey by a team of doctors shows that half the number of patients receiving critical care in public hospitals die.
A study at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital found that 54 per cent of patients taken to the intensive care unit did not survive.
This high death rate, the study found, is at par with similar hospitals in resource-limited settings worldwide.
The researchers included Ms Wangari Waweru-Siika, then the head of the MTRH intensive care unit and Mr Protus Kituyi, the chairman of the Department of Anesthesia at the Moi University School of Medicine.
The “Intensive Care Outcomes and Mortality Prediction at a National Referral Hospital in Western Kenya” was published in the National Institutes of Health journal in November.
Whereas the ICU at the hospital has undergone improvements, the study said the workers are stretched thin. The unit has relatively modern equipment, experienced nurses and physicians. It is capable of advanced therapy.
“MTRH has less than one ICU bed per 100 hospital beds, compared with an average of nine ICU beds in the United States,” Peter Kussin, the co-principal investigator and professor of medicine at Duke Global Health Institute, said.
Essential interventions are not consistently available and a shortage of ICU beds keeps some critically ill patients in the wards for too long, leading to irreversible clinical deterioration.
The authors say events that take place before patients arrive at the ICU play a big role on their survival chances.
Prof Kussin says a strong support among Kenyans to increase ICU bed capacity would provide only a partial solution to the problems leading to poor critical care outcomes.