Annual report of the Medical Department / Uganda Protectorate.

  • Uganda Protectorate. Medical Department.
Date:
[1949]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Medical Department / Uganda Protectorate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    13/64 (page 9)
    or “njoka” (literally, a snake in the stomach) afford little information about the real cause of death. Less than one-twentieth of all deaths occurred in Government hospitals and it is rare for deaths outside to be attended by medical practitioners. 31. (b) Notification ofinfectious diseases.—These include patients treated at Government medical units and also cases notified by private practitioners, health inspectors and chiefs or discovered during routine surveys. The completeness and promptitude of the notifications depend on many personal and administrative factors. It is difficult at the time to judge how complete the notifications are, but subsequent information often demonstrates their inaccuracy. 32. (c) Hospital and dispensary returns.—In European countries, little use has been made of hospital returns as a guide to the incidence of disease since the data available in the past have been fragmentary. In Uganda, where each unit is accustomed to make a classified return for all patients and where the large bulk of treatment is undertaken by Government, useful information can be extracted from such returns. The accuracy of diagnosis is subject to the greatest error in the returns from dispensaries in charge of unqualified medical staff. The accuracy improves for hospital patients and is highest for deaths corroborated by post-mortem examination. These latter groups are, in turn, both smaller in number and more subject to selection, so that their usefulness for estimating the incidence of particular diseases is limited. 33. (d) Morbidity data from selected communities.—Information about the incidence of disease can be obtained from the sickness records of Government officials, prisoners, school children and labourers in industrial and agricultural enterprises. Other sources of information are ante-natal clinics and special surveys covering scattered areas of the country. None of these can be considered satisfactory random samples, and conclusions drawn from them have to be used with caution when the whole population is being considered. 34. The diseases which bulk most largely in the hospital returns and those most commonly leading to admission are set out in Tables 10 and 11, respectively. Table 10 Hospital patients Disease Patients Treated Percentage of all patients seen Malaria including blackwater fever 107,949 13-0 Respiratory diseases (all forms) 92,423 11 • 1 Venereal diseases 88,689 10-7 Accidents 70,293 8-5 Diseases of the eye 30,284 3‘7 Dysentery and diarrhoea 21,158 '2-6