SDC 1. Supplementary Notes to Methods Settings Groote Schuur
Mouton JP, Njuguna C, Kramer N, Stewart A, Mehta U, Blockman M, et al. Adverse drug reactions causing admission to medical wards: a cross-sectional survey at four hospitals in South Africa. Supplemental Digital Content SDC 1. Supplementary notes to Methods Settings Groote Schuur Hospital is a 975-bed urban academic hospital situated in Cape Town, in the Western Cape province, which provides secondary and tertiary level care, serves as a referral centre for approximately half of the province’s population (2011 population: 5.8 million)1 and is associated with the University of Cape Town. At this hospital we surveyed the general medical wards during May and June 2013. We did not survey the sub-speciality wards (dermatology, neurology, cardiology, respiratory medicine and nephrology), the oncology wards, or the high care / intensive care units. Restricting the survey to general medical wards was done partly due to resource limitations but also to allow the patients at this site to be reasonably comparable to those at other sites, which did not have sub-specialist wards. In 2009, the crude inpatient mortality in the medical wards of Groote Schuur Hospital was shown to be 573/3465 patients (17%)2 and the 12-month post-discharge mortality to be 145/415 (35%).3 Edendale Hospital is a 900-bed peri-urban regional teaching hospital situated near Pietermaritzburg, in the KwaZulu-Natal province (2011 population: 10.3 million).1 It provides care to the peri-urban community and serves as a referral centre for several district hospitals in the surrounding rural area. It is located at the epicentre of the HIV, tuberculosis and multidrug resistant tuberculosis epidemics in South Africa: a post-mortem study in 2008-2009 found that 94% of decedents in the medical wards of Edendale Hospital were HIV-seropositive, 50% had culture-positive tuberculosis at the time of death and 17% of these cultures were resistant to isoniazid and rifampicin.4 At Edendale Hospital, we surveyed the medical wards over 30 days during July and August of 2013.
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