Delays in diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis in patients seeking care at a regional referral hospital, Uganda : a cross sectional study
Abstract
Objective: A cross-sectional survey involving 134 pulmonary TB patients started on TB treatment at the TB Treatment Unit of the regional referral hospital was conducted to ascertain the prevalence of individual and health facility delays and associated factors. Prolonged health facility delay was taken as delay of more than 1 week and prolonged patient delay as delay of more than 3 weeks. A logistic regression model was done using STATA version 12 to determine the delays. Results: There was a median total delay of 13 weeks and 110 (82.1%) of the respondents had delay of more than 4 weeks. Patient delay was the most frequent and greatest contributor of total delay and exceeded 3 weeks in 95 (71.6%) respondents. At multivariate analysis, factors that influenced delay included poor patient knowledge on TB (adjOR 6.904, 95% CI 1.648-28.921; p = 0.04) and being unemployed (adjOR 3.947, 95% CI 1.382-11.274; p = 0.010) while being female was found protective of delay; adjOR 0.231, 95% CI 0.08-0.67; p = 0.007). Patient delay was the most significant, frequent and greatest contributor to total delay, and factors associated with delay included being unemployed, low knowledge on TB while being female was found protective of delay.
Citation
Muttamba , W , Kyobe , S , Komuhangi , A , Lakony , J , Buregyeya , E , Mabumba , E & Basaza , R K 2019 , ' Delays in diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis in patients seeking care at a regional referral hospital, Uganda : a cross sectional study ' , BMC Research Notes , vol. 12 , 589 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-019-4616-2
Publication
BMC Research Notes
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1756-0500Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Description
This study was funded using Authors’ personal resources.Collections
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