Injury surveillance in a rural sub-Saharan setting: Results from a pilot surveillance initiative in Nzega District, Tanzania
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Global Health, Public Health
- Keywords
- Trauma, Road Traffic Collisions, Falls, Violence, Tanzania, Injury, Rural
- Copyright
- © 2019 Davis et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Injury surveillance in a rural sub-Saharan setting: Results from a pilot surveillance initiative in Nzega District, Tanzania. PeerJ Preprints 7:e1884v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1884v2
Abstract
Introduction: Ninety percent of all injuries occur in low- and middle-income countries and most of these injuries are largely preventable. Most injury surveillance systems are focused in large urban settings, which largely ignore injury mechanisms in rural contexts which are critical settings for planning future prevention efforts. Methods: Injury event information was collected from July 1 to July 31, 2013 at Nzega District Hospital (NDH) in central Tanzania using an injury questionnaire derived from World Health Organization injury surveillance guidelines. One hundred injured patients were enrolled and surveyed about the location of their injury, cause and other contextual and demographic factors. Results: Seventy-nine percent of participants were males and the most prevalent injury cause for all participants was road traffic collisions, making up 31\% of the injuries. Violence was the second most prevalent cause, accounting for 28\% of the injuries, and the number one cause of injuries for women. Twenty-three percent (n=7) of patients suffering from injuries due to road traffic collisions were given a prognosis of long-term disability of six months or more. Conclusion: Nzega District experienced a large number of injuries in a one-month period, consistent with other studies conducted in low- and middle-income country settings and is higher than several infectious diseases already considered pressing public health problems. More comprehensive data collection is required in order to fully understand the extent of this public health problem.
Author Comment
Substantial revisions along with the survey tool being published.