European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine

Abstract

In Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,preventable injuries are the second leading cause of death, accounting for about a fifth of all reported fatalities in the country. During the last decade, the importance of health-related quality of life (HRQOL) has been recognized as a principal outcome of these traumatic injuries. Hence this study is being carried out to assess the outcome and to determine the factors associated with it. Methodology: All the Patients attending orthopaedic department of King Khalid General hospital, Al Majmaah with history of trauma in the past 2 years were included in the study. After obtaining Verbal consent from the study subjects data was collected by an orthopaedic surgeon. SF-36 questionnaire was used to collect information on Health Related Quality of Life. Qualitative variables are expressed as frequency and percentages and Quantitative variables are expressed as median and range. For comparison between groups Chi-Square test was applied. Significance level is fixed as 5% (p<0.05). Results: Total 152 study subjects participated in this study, 135 (88.8%) among them were from Saudi, 93 (61.2%) were, most of them 36 (23.6%) belonged to 11-20 years age group. The median HRQOL score in this study was 59.25(25), it was highest for the domain “pain” [67.5(34)] and “GH” [67.5(65)] when compared to other domains. HRQOL scores were more among those from non-Saudi [54.22(34.17)], for females [56.85(31.87)], for those in the age group between 1-10 years [72.54(26.22)], for those with sprains [61.06(29.65)], for those with sport injuries [63.75(35.14)] and for those in whom duration since injury was 21-24 months [61.67(23)]. Conclusion: In this study, SF- 36 served as a simple and an easy tool to assess the health-related quality of life of post orthopaedic trauma patients. All the socio-demographic variables were found to be significantly associated with HRQOL scores.