Survival and its predictors among preterm neonates admitted to neonatal intensive care unit at Felege Hiwot referral hospital, Northwest Ethiopia, from 2014-2018.

Abstract

Abstract Introduction: Nearly 15 million preterm births have happened every year globally. It accounts for about 1 million neonatal deaths in the world per year. Similarly, it is the second cause of neonatal mortality in Ethiopia. Therefore, this study was aimed at identifying determinants of preterm mortality in Felege Hiwot referral hospital, Northwest Ethiopia. Objectives: To assess mortality rate and its predictors among preterm neonates admitted to neonatal intensive care unit at Felege Hiwot referral hospital, Bahirdar, Northwest Ethiopia from 2014 – 2018. Methods: Institution based retrospective cohort study was conducted among preterm neonates admitted in Bahirdar city, Felege Hiwot referral Hospital, neonatal intensive care unit from 2014-2018. Secondary data was abstracted from 542 randomly selected charts using facility based data abstraction form. After clearing and checking completeness of data, it was entered by Epi info version 7 and exported to STATA version 14, for cleaning, coding, transformation and analysis. Cox proportional hazard model was used for analysis. Kaplan Meier curves and Log-rank test was used to estimate survival time and to compare statistical differences between categories of variables respectively. Hazard ratio with a 95% confidence interval was calculated and a statistical significance was accepted at Keywords: Preterm neonates, Mortality rate, Predictors, Ethiopia