Survival Analysis of Patients’ Length of Hospital Stay: A Case Study at the Legon Hospital, University of Ghana, Accra.

Abstract

Patient‟s duration of stay at the hospital is one useful indicator many employ to assess the performance and efficiency of healthcare provided by hospitals and healthcare units. Also, patients‟ LOS and inpatient mortality are two interconnected health issues with complex outcomes, and studying the relationship between the two is not an easy task. This study therefore employed non-parametric and semi-parametric statistics in modeling patients‟ survival time to death using secondary data from the Legon Hospital, university of Ghana, Accra. In the data analysis, we modeled patients‟ survival time to death by applying the Kaplan Meier survival model and Logrank test for equality of survival curves. Factors that are significant by the Logrank test are subjected to Cox PH regression analysis to determine their associative effect to relative hazards of patients‟ survival time to death at the hospital, within the study period. A summary of the results revealed that out of a sample of 532 patients used for the study, 394 events of interests (deaths) occurred within the study period with a mean duration of hospital stay as 6.8 days with prevalence and incidence rates of 74.06% and 10.88%, respectively. The Logrank test and Cox PH analysis revealed that age, cause of death and type of disease are valid predictors of patients‟ survival time to death, whereas regression analysis by cause of death reported that infectious diseases, cancers, respiratory disorders, diseases of blood and blood forming organs, and genitourinary diseases are significant predictors of the relative hazards of patients‟ survival time to death at the Legon Hospital, University of Ghana, Accra.