Mortality Patterns among Patients admitted at a Tertiary Care Facility in Nepal: A Descriptive Cross-sectional Analysis.

Abstract

Introduction: Analyzing mortality trends offers important insights into the existing healthcare measures and for this our study outlines mortality patterns of patients admitted at a tertiary care hospital in Nepal. This involves analyzing primary cause of death among inpatients, distribution of death according to patients age and gender, distribution of deaths within the hospital by departments and categorizing deaths as natural and unnatural and observing patterns of death based on date and time of admission and death.

Methods: Mortality from November 2025 to May 2026 were analyzed. Deceased age, sex, date and time of arrival, date and time of death, diagnosis, or cause of death, department or unit where death happened and manner of death as natural and unnatural, were recorded. The data was analyzed in the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software, version 27. Descriptive statistics were used to present the data in terms of frequencies and percentages. The statistical association between the variables were analyzed using Chi-Square test and the p-value of <0.05 was considered significant.

Results: This study explored that mortality was predominant among males (62.77%). Maximum number of deaths were seen in elderly people of 60-80 years. Majority of death happened after 1 day to a week, after arrival to the hospital, with highest rate in medicine department as stroke, the leading cause of death and Chitwan district accounting for highest mortality.

Conclusions: The study demonstrates that natural manner of death is higher than unnatural manner and mortality is male predominance and stroke as the leading cause of death. Further studies are required in other parts of our nation to understand pattern of mortality at national level.