A Study of the Health-related Quality of Life in Injured Patients Three Years after ICU Hospitalization

Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) considerably decreases after injured.This study aimed to assess and compare the quality of life during a three years’ period afterinjury and hospital stay among the injured patients admitted in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU)for 24 hours at least with non-ICU injured patients as the control group. In this cross-sectional study, 204 injured patients treated by the injured team ofShahid Rajaee Injured Center of Shiraz, Iran, were evaluated from January 2019 to December2020. HRQOL was measured using the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form 36 (SF-36).Patients were called and asked to answer the SF-36 questionnaire according to the currentcondition. SPSS was used to analyze the data. The mean age of the ICU and non-ICU patients was 34.34 and 37.68 years,respectively. The majority of patients in both ICU and non-ICU groups were male (83.5%,88.1%) and under 60 years of age (91.3%, 92.1%). The injury severity score (ISS) was markedas critical in 66.99% of ICU patients. The mean SF-36 scores in ICU patients were lowerthan the similar indices in non-ICU patients in all dimensions (P<0.001) Except for socialfunctioning, a non-significant difference was observed between the ICU and non-ICUpatients for only two subscales. Health-related quality of life among the patients with sustained severe injurieswho were admitted to ICU decreased considerably after three years follow up. Given thatcertain factors can help identify patients in need of sufficient pain management, adequateinformation can help injury specialist teams for follow-ups.