In-hospital mortality of acutely ill medical patients admitted to a resource poor hospital in sub-Saharan Africa and to a Canadian Regional Hospital compared using the abbreviated VitalPAC™ Early Warning Score

• The outcomes of acutely ill patients in a small African and large Canadian hospital were compared
• Illness severity was measured using an abbreviated version of the VitalPAC™ early warning score
• The mortality of Canadian and Ugandan patients with the same severity of illness was similar.
• The prediction of death within 24 h by the abbreviated ViEWS was the same in both hospitals

Backgroundthe development of validated early warning scores that only require the measurement of vital signs at the bedside has provided for the first time a practical and affordable method of comparing the outcomes of similar patients admitted to hospital in the developed and developing world.Methodswe compared the outcomes of patients with the same abbreviated version of the VitalPAC™ early warning score at the time of hospital admission in a Canadian and Ugandan hospital. 844 acutely ill medical patients admitted to Kitovu Hospital, Masaka, Uganda and 48,696 patients admitted to the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC), Ontario, Canada were examined.Resultsapart from those patients with an abbreviated ViEWS value of 10 there was no statistically significant difference in the in-hospital mortality of Kitvou and TBRHSC patients with the same score on admission. Using arbitrary ranges of the abbreviated ViEWS the 30 day Kaplan–Meier survival curves of Kitovu patients were either the same or better than those of TBRHSC patients.Conclusionthe in-hospital mortality of patients with the same abbreviated ViEWS on hospital admission is similar in TBRHSC and Kitovu Hospital.