Background
Injury accounts for over 5 million deaths per year worldwide and 11% of all disability-adjusted life years, and sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is disproportionally affected.1 2 In SSA, it is difficult to estimate the true burden of trauma because of inadequate surveillance data.3–5 To address this problem, the WHO Guidelines for Essential Trauma Care stress the importance of improved injury surveillance in low-income and middle-income countries (LMIC).6 These data are essential to determine the true burden of injury, evaluate the quality of care being provided, identify targets for performance improvement and systems strengthening, and inform advocacy and injury prevention strategies.7–9
Most studies of injury in Ethiopia and elsewhere in SSA only collect data through emergency department disposition or hospital discharge.10 11 Attempts to describe long-term disability after injury in resource-poor settings are complicated by weak healthcare infrastructure and lack of regular follow-up, although several community-based surveys have suggested that many trauma patients do experience significant long-term disability.12 13 Although little has been published about clinical outcomes of trauma patients in Ethiopia, one study showed that routine delays in both emergent and elective operations resulted in significant preventable death and disability.14
Recent expansion of mobile telephone technology offers a novel opportunity for improved follow-up. The number of mobile telephone subscriptions in Ethiopia has increased rapidly from 400 000 in 2005 to 42 million in 2015, compared with only 1 million land lines.15 Currently, there is nearly one mobile telephone subscription for every two people in Ethiopia. Several previous studies have demonstrated the utility of telephone-administered interviews to collect outcomes data in SSA.16 17 Potential challenges include inaccurately documented telephone numbers, inability to contact patients, language barriers, and patients’ unwillingness to participate in telephone-administered interviews.
We hypothesized that telephone-administered interviews are a feasible method of collecting data about the long-term functional outcomes of trauma patients in urban Ethiopia. The specific objectives of this study were (1) to assess the feasibility of telephone-administered interviews as means of collecting follow-up data in this context; (2) to pilot a telephone-administered interview tool for collecting data about long-term functional outcomes after injury; and (3) to collect preliminary data about patients’ long-term functional outcomes after hospital encounters due to injury.