Research Article Factors Associated with Patient’s Delay in

Copyright © 2014 Endalew Gebeyehu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Background. Unknown proportions of tuberculosis cases remain undiagnosed and untreated as result of several factors which further increases the number of tuberculosis cases per index case. Objective. To identify factors associated with patient’s delay in initiating treatment of tuberculosis. Methods. Cross-sectional study was employed from January to April, 2013, in Bahir Dar Ethiopia. A total of 360 patients were included.Datawere collected from tuberculosis patients using a semistructured questionnaire. Data were entered and analyzed using SPSS version 16 windows.Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to identify factors associated with patient delay. Results. Of all patients, 211 (62%) sought medical care after theWHO recommended period (21 days). The median patient delays of smear positive, smear negative, and extrapulmonary patients were 27 (IQR: 10–59), 30 (IQR: 9–65), and 31 (IQR: 10–150) days, respectively, with statistically significant variations among them (ANOVA