Discharges of patients from general hospitals against medical advice in Kuwait [1999]

This study tries to determine the main diagnoses of patients discharged against medical advice [AMA] as well as their demographic features. Data used were collected from hospital discharge summaries from general hospitals in Kuwait for the year 1999. The target population was all patients discharged AMA, equal sample discharged with physician approval matched by age and sex was selected as controls. Data from general hospitals in Kuwait revealed that patients discharged AMA constituted 6.0% from all discharges from these hospitals in 1999. Farwania and Jahra hospitals had the highest proportion of discharge AMA. The results also revealed that AMA group differed significantly from routinely discharged group in a number of factors including, nationality, type of admission, average length of stay and discharging diagnoses. Patients discharged AMA had serious untreated conditions like abnormal laboratory findings, possible delivery complications and ischaemic heart diseases. The results revealed that the risk of discharge AMA increases among Kuwaiti nationality, single, patients admitted through casualty, patients suffering from possible delivery complications and patients suffering from ischaemic heart diseases

Youth and middle aged mortality in Kuwait [1987 - 1998]

This study assesses the proportionate mortality [PM] from the major causes of death among youth [20-34 year] and middle-aged population [35-64 year] in the years 1987-1998 in Kuwait. Deaths in the records were classified according to the Ninth Revision of the international Classification of Death [ICD-9], proportionate mortality computed for all causes of death combined and for the upper ranked 10 cause groups. The results revealed that PM among youth increased significantly from 7.6% in the pre-invasion period [1987-1989] to 10.8% in the early post-invasion period [1991-1994] and then started to decline reaching to 9.8% in the late post-invasion period [1995-1998]. On the other hand, the PM among middle aged population increased steadily from 32.1% in the pre-invasion to 33.3% and 34.9% in the post-invasion periods. The study also revealed that fatalities due to external causes constituted a major health problem among youth in Kuwait and the main cause of death is road transport accidents which accounted for 28.5% of all deaths among youth each year during the study periods. The second and third causes were ischaemic heart disease [7.6%] and consequences of violence [6.8%]. On the other hand, fatalities due to cardiovascular diseases constituted a major health problem among the middle aged individuals and the three leading causes of death were ischaemic heart disease. hypertensive disease and road transport accidents respectively Digestive system malignancy ranked fifth and malignancy of respiratory and intrathoracic organs ranked tenth. The results revealed that the main causes of death are the same among Kuwaiti and non-Kuwaiti segments with some differences in ranking order and frequency