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Background Africa accounts for one sixth of global road traffic deaths—most in the pre-hospital setting. Ambulance transport is expensive relative to other modes of pre-hospital transport, but has advantages in time-sensitive, high-acuity scenarios. Many countries, including Ethiopia, are expanding ambulance fleets, but clinical characteristics of patients using ambulances remain ill-defined. Methods This is a cross-sectional study of 662 road traffic collisions (RTC) patients arriving to a single trauma referral center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, over 7 months. Emergency Department triage records were used to abstract clinical and arrival characteristics, including acuity. The outcome of interest was ambulance arrival. Secondary outcomes of interest were inter-facility referral and referral communication. Descriptive and multivariable statistics were computed to identify factors independently associated with outcomes. Results Over half of patients arrived with either high (13.1%) or moderate (42.2%) acuity. Over half (59.0%) arrived by ambulance, and nearly two thirds (65.9%) were referred. Among referred patients, inter-facility communication was poor (57.7%). Patients with high acuity were most likely to be referred (aOR 2.20, 95%CI 1.16–4.17), but were not more likely to receive ambulance transport (aOR 1.56, 95%CI 0.86–2.84) or inter-facility referral communication (aOR 0.98, 95%CI 0.49–1.94) than those with low acuity. Nearly half (40.2%) of all patients were referred by ambulance despite having low acuity. Conclusions Despite ambulance expansion in Addis Ababa, ambulance use among RTC patients remains heavily concentrated among those with low-acuity. Inter-facility referral appears a primary contributor to low-acuity ambulance use. In other contexts, similar routine ambulance monitoring may help identify low-value utilization. Regional guidelines may help direct ambulance use where most valuable, and warrant further evaluation. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12873-018-0158-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Table S2. Factors associated with ambulance arrival among RTC patients arriving from the scene, AaBET Hospital, Addis Ababa. (DOCX 14Â kb)

Table S1. Factors associated with ambulance arrival among RTC patients referred from another institution, AaBET Hospital, Addis Ababa. (DOCX 15Â kb)

Objective To characterise acute poisonings in pregnant and non-pregnant women treated at emergency departments of government hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, between 2010 and 2015. Methods All data for acutely poisoned women were retrospectively collected from patient medical charts at the emergency departments of Saint Paul's Hospital Millennium Medical College, Ras Desta Memorial Hospital, Yekatit 12 Hospital Medical College and Zewditu Memorial Hospital. Data were collected by extraction questionnaire and analysed using SPSSv. 20 statistical software. Results During the study period, 998 cases of acutely poisoned women were listed in the hospital registries. Of these, complete data for inclusion in the study were available for 592. 36.3% of the study participants were in the age group of 20–24, with a mean (±SD) age of 23.03 (±6.3) years. 80.9% were from Addis Ababa; 4.6% were pregnant. The mean arrival time of all cases was 4.14 h. 85.5% of all study cases were due to intentional self-poisoning, of whom 42.1% were discharged without complications. The most common poisons were bleach and organophosphates; 25.9% of pregnant cases and 32.6% of non-pregnant cases were poisoned by bleach; and 18.5% of pregnant cases and 18.9% of non-pregnant cases had organophosphate poisoning. 0.7% had a history of poisoning; all were non-pregnant women. The common route of poison exposure was oral, and the case fatality rate of organophosphate poisoning in pregnant and non-pregnant women was 20 and 1.87%, respectively. The pre-hospital intervention for the majority of the women was milk, in 12.0% of cases. Conclusion Acute poisoning remains a public health problem in our community. Bleach is the most common poisons. Our present findings indicate the necessity of educational programmes on preventable reasons of acute poisonings and their outcomes on pregnant and non-pregnant women.