Unintentional injuries and socio-psychological correlates among school-going adolescents in Mozambique

ABSTRACT

Background: The study aimed to report on the prevalence and socio-psychological correlates of non-fatal injury among school-going adolescents in Mozambique.

Methods: Cross-sectional data from the 2015 ‘Global School-based Health Survey (GSHS)’ included 1918 students (median age 15 years, interquartile range = 3 years) that were representative of all students in secondary school in Mozambique.

Results: The proportion of participants with one or multiple injuries in the past 12 months was 55.7%, 30.0% once and 25.7% multiple times. The most frequent cause of the reported injury was ‘traffic injury’ (7.6%), followed by ‘fall’ (7.0%), 'poisoning' (5.0%), ‘struck or hit by person’ (3.6%) and ‘struck or hit by object’ (2.6%). The most common injury type was ‘fracture or dislocation’ (9.8%), followed by ‘cut or stab wound’ (7.5%), burns (2.7%) and ‘gunshot wound’ (2.6%). In adjusted logistic regression analysis, current tobacco use, attending physical education classes three or more days a week and psychological distress were associated with annual injury.

Conclusion: A high prevalence of annual injury was found and several variables were identified that could be targeted in injury prevention programmes in this school population.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychosocial factors
• injury
• substance use
• school adolescents
• Mozambique

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the World Health Organization for making the data available for analysis (“https://www.who.int/ncds/surveillance/gshs/timorlestedataset/en/”), and the country coordinator from Mozambique (Augusto Nunes) for the assistance in GSHS data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contributions

SP and KP designed the analysis, interpretations, drafted the manuscript and reviewed the paper.