One-year follow-up of survival and health-related quality of life in patients with medical conditions admitted acutely to hospital in Malawi and Tanzania

Multimorbidity, defined as the coexistence of two or more long-term conditions, is a major public health issue. In southern and eastern Africa, limited access to primary care frequently results in delayed diagnosis and chronic disease decompensation with the need for acute hospital admission [1]. This report details 1-year survival and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) data in patients admitted acutely to hospitals in Malawi and Tanzania and follows on from our study that detailed the high prevalence of hypertension (44%); HIV (31%); and diabetes mellitus (27%) in patients admitted to hospital [2].

We conducted this study in line with our published protocol [3] and with statistical methodology replicated from our multicentre cohort study [2]. Patients were categorised based on the number (none, one and two or more) of long-term conditions. The 1-year follow-up for all patients was completed in December 2024. We evaluated 1-year survival and HRQoL (where a score of 1 represents perfect health and a score of 0 represents death) in survivors using EQ5D-5l. We have provided an open access link to our database hosted at: https://publications.mlw.mw. The 1-year survival analysis for this study was performed in R (4.4.1; R Studio for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria) using the survival, survminer and ggplot2 packages and HRQoL analysis was conducted in Stata MP 18.0 (StataCorp, College Station, TX, USA).