oa Functional disability of road traffic injury patients admitted to the National Hospital of Sri Lanka on admission and three months after discharge from the hospital

Road traffic accidents are an emerging public health problem. The deaths due to road traffic injuries represent only a small fraction of the total waste of human and social resources. Road traffic injuries leading to disabilities are often neglected part of the problem. In the year of 2010, it was reported 2721 have died and 26487 have sustained injuries due to road traffic accidents. Sri Lanka being a middle income country, the information on disability following road traffic injuries is scarce. Therefore, a descriptive cross sectional study was conducted to describe the functional disability of road traffic injury patients. A descriptive cross sectional study was conducted among 881road traffic injury patients admitted to the National Hospital of Sri Lanka. The functional disability of activities of daily living was assessed on admission and after three months of hospital discharge using validated Sinhala version of 10 item- Barthel Index. The total score of the index was 0 to 20 and score of less than 19 was considered as functional disability. Injury severity was measured using Injury Severity Score (ISS) based in Abbreviated Injury Severity Scale (AIS). There were 793 (90.1%) males and 88 (9.9%) females. Of them 551 (56.9%) had sustained injuries to one AIS body regions, 322 (36.5%) and 58 (6.6%) had sustained injuries to two and three or more than three AIS body region respectively. The mean (±SD) total score of Barthel Index on admission and three months after discharge were 12.8(±4.4) and 18.2(± 2.9) respectively. Functional disability was observed in 91.1% of the injured at admission and 33.9% at three months after hospital discharge (p=0.00). At three months after the injury significant increase proportion of functional disability was observed with increase number of body regions injured (p=0.000) and with increase injury severity (p=0.000). Functional disability of road traffic injury patients on admission had reduced to 33.9% at three months after discharge from the hospital. One third of the study population was having functional disability at three months of the hospital discharge is note worthy to take actions.