Developing a trauma registry in a middle-income country – Botswana

Botswana has a large burden of disease from injury, but no trauma registry. This study sought to design and pilot test a trauma registry at two hospitals. Methods A cross sectional study was piloted at a tertiary hospital and a secondary level hospital in Botswana. The study consisted of two stages: stage 1 – stakeholders' consultation and trauma registry prototype was designed. Stage 2 consisted of two phases: Phase I involved retrospective collection of existing data from existing data collection tools and Phase II collected data prospectively using the proposed trauma registry prototype. Results The pre-hospital road traffic accident data are collected using hard copy forms and some of these data were transferred to a stand-alone electronic registry. The hospital phase of road traffic accident data all goes into hard copy files then stored in institutional registry departments. The post-hospital data were also partially stored as hard copies and some data are stored in a stand-alone electronic registry. The demographics, pre-hospital, triage, diagnosis, management and disposition had a high percent variable completion rate with no significant difference between phases I and II. However, the primary survey variables in Phase I had a low percent variable completion rate which was significantly different from the high completion rates in phase II at both hospitals. A similar picture was observed for the secondary survey at both hospitals. Conclusion Electronic trauma registries are feasible and data completion rate is high when using the electronic data registry as opposed to data collected using the existing paper-based data collection tools.