ABSTRACT

Background: There are various reports on the mortality and morbidity of hospitalization in ICUs.

Aim: To evaluate demographic factors of patients who died in the ICU and its relation with time of death in 2014.

Methods: The present cross-sectional study used census sampling to investigate the medical records of all the patients who were hospitalized in the ICU of RasoolAkram Hospital in 2014 and then died in the unit. The demographic data of each patient was extracted from his records, including items on age, gender, unit of hospitalization, time of death, duration of hospital stay, cause of the disease, duration of CPR and the number of code announcements. The unit records were used to extract the mean number of employees in each unit, the number of beds in each ICU and the number of patients who died in each shift. The data obtained were then analyzed by SPSS-16.

Results: The present study examined 425 patients. The median time of death was 11:30 (IQR: 10), and 31.8% of the deaths had occurred in the morning shift, 23.1% in the afternoon shift and 45.2% in the night shift. The median duration of hospital stay was 10 days (IQR: 15). The number of resuscitations was reported as 1 (IQR: 2) and the median duration of CPR was 45 minutes (IQR: 15). A total of 41.2% of the patients were hospitalized in the BICU, 22.6% in the MICU, 22.6% in the SICU, 7.8% in the PICU and 5.9% in the NICU.

Conclusion:The number of deaths was significantly higher in the night shift than that of in the morning and evening shifts. In the BICU ward, although the number of shift nurses was higher in the morning, however mortality rates were higher in the morning shift. Cause of intensive care unit admission following burns, intracerebral hemorrhage, pneumonia, trauma, stroke, brain tumor, cardiac arrest, kidney failure, there were liver failure, breast cancer, and more.