Following cardiac surgery intensive care unit (ICU) is the immediate place to stay. The length of stay (LOS) in the ICU is the average duration patients stay in ICU following cardiac surgery. Length of stay is one of the most significant factors that face hospitals today. Prolonged ICU stay is an important determinant of increased suffering and death after cardiac procedures because there are too many identified and unidentified factors that determine ICU stay. The aim of this study is

more »

... to assess factors associated with length of ICU stay following cardiac surgery in Cardiac Center Ethiopia. Methods: Institution-based descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on patients with cardiac surgery at Cardiac Centre Ethiopia, from November to March 2021. Two hundred forty-eight (248) charts were selected by lottery method. Data were entered into Epi-info 7.2 and export to SPSS version 25.0 for analysis. Descriptive statistics such as mean, frequency and percentages were calculated to describe and displayed in tables, graphs and charts. Binary logistic regression employed to see basic association of each independent variable with dependent variables. Multivariate logistics regression was employed to control the effect of confounding in 95% confidence level at P-value less than 0.05. Results: In this study the length of Intensive Care Unit stay following cardiac surgery was 3.79 ± 1.7 days ranging from 1 to 9 days, 126 (50.8%) had longer ICU stay after cardiac surgery in Cardiac Centre Ethiopia. Smoking history, having more than one surgery procedure and post cardiac surgery have been found significantly related with prolonged ICU stay following cardiac surgery in the current study area at p value ≤ 0.05. Recommendation: We recommend hospital managers and cardiac hospitals to prevent post cardiac surgery complications as these were found the main determinants of prolonged ICU stay in this study. We Further recommend for prospective follow-up study to examine whether these findings represent the true figure in this study.