Neonatal mortality rate (NMR) in intensive care unit (ICU) of Ardabil city hospitals and related factors

Background: Neonatal mortality rate (NMR) is one of the important parameters in assessing quality of life in societies. NMR are often used as a standard index for evaluation health, education and social systems, nutritional status and health programs for neonates in countries and the first step in reducing mortality rate and promoting the level of this indicator is to identify the causes of mortality. Therefore, this study was conducted to determine the NMR in new born infants admitted to the ICU of Ardabil city hospitals.Methods: This study was a descriptive cross-sectional study that has been done on 184 dead neonates in Ardabil city hospital during 2016-2017. The necessary information was extracted from the hospital records of neonates and entered in a provided checklist and then analyzed by statistical methods such as tables in SPSS version 19.Results: The mortality rate of hospitalized infants in this research was 6.6%. Of all patients, in 65.2% CBC were impaired and 58.7% of patients had impaired serologic and biochemical tests. 68.5% of patients had prematurity, 62.5% RDS and 20.7% had congenital anomalies.Conclusions: Prematurity, RDS and congenital anomalies are the most important causes of NMR and we should programing to decreasing the NMR rate in future