BACKGROUND: Traffic accidents are ranked first as the cause of personal injury throughout the world. The high number of traffic accidents yielding injuries and fatalities makes them of great importance to Emergency Departments.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: Patients admitted to Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine Adult Emergency Department due to traffic accidents were investigated epidemiologically. Differences between groups were evaluated by Kruskall-Wallis, Mann-Whitney, and Wilcoxon tests. A value of p<0.05 was accepted as statistically significant.

RESULTS: We included 2003 patients over 16 years of age. The mean age was 39.6±16.1 and 55% were males. Admissions by ambulance and due to motor vehicle accidents were the most common. In 2004 the rate of traffic accidents (15.3%) was higher than the other years, the most common month was May (10.8%), and the most common time period was 6 pm to 12 am (midnight). About half of the patients (51.5%) were admitted in the first 30 minutes. Life-threatening condition was present in 9.6% of the patients. Head trauma was the most common type of trauma, with the rate of 18.3%. Mortality rate was 81.8%. The average length of hospital stay was 403 minutes (6.7 hours) and the average cost per patient was 983±4364 TL.

CONCLUSIONS: Further studies are needed to compare the cost found in this study with the mean cost for Turkey. However, the most important step to reduce the direct and indirect costs due to traffic accidents is the prevention of these accidents.

Keywords: Emergency Service, Hospital - utilization, Accidents, Traffic - statistics & numerical data, Mortality, Time Factors, Turkey - epidemiology