Abraham Admas and Tsegaye Alemu
Background: According to World Health Organization’s 2014 report, the global overall rate of interpersonal conflicts’ physical injury was 6.7 per 100,000 populations. Low and middle income regions of African region are the most affected, with a rate of 10.7 per 100 000 population. In Ethiopia, particularly in South Ari district, research evidence on interpersonal physical violence injury was limited. Therefore, this study tried to fill the scarce on evidence based scientific determination about the status and risk factors of this neglected public health problem at the district.
Objective: To assess the magnitude and risk factors of intentional inter personal physical violence injury in South Ari district, South Omo zone, Southern Ethiopia.
Methods: Health facility based cross sectional study was conducted in South Ari district from January to April 2018. Amharic version pre-tested structured interview questionnaire was used. Eight diploma holder nurses and two degree holder public health professionals collected the data. All health centers (n=09) in the district were included in this study and all individuals with trauma who visited to the emergency department of these health centers during the study period were interviewed. Data were entered and cleaned in Epi-Info software, and then exported to SPSS. Then, descriptive statistics, binary logistic regression with 95% Confidence Intervals (C.I.) and a p-value of 0.05 were computed to determine statistical significant between factors and outcome.
Results: The magnitude of intentional interpersonal physical violence related injury was found to be 42.2% (n=167). Land-Ownership conflict (AOR=2.18; 95%CI, 1.32-3.58), low socio-economic status (AOR=1.73; 95%CI, 1.08-2.92), neglected parenting practice (AOR=7.97; 95%CI, 4.77-13.34) and alcohol influence (AOR=3.39; 95%CI, 2.05-5.61) were found to be a significant predictors (p-value ≤ 0.05) for intentional interpersonal physical violence related injury.
Conclusion: In this study, the magnitude of intentional interpersonal physical violence related injury was considerably high (42.2%), which was associated with land-ownership conflict, low socio-economic status, neglected parenting practice of children and alcohol influence. Therefore, community level awareness about the causes and consequences of intentional interpersonal physical violence should be created.
