Liberian Surgical and Anesthesia Infrastructure: A Survey of County Hospitals

Abstract

A significant volume of surgical care is being delivered at county hospitals throughout Liberia. The density and quality of appropriately trained personnel and infrastructure remain critically low. There is strong evidence for continued development of emergency and essential surgical services, as well as improved surgical outcomes tracking, at county hospitals in Liberia. These results serve to inform the international community and donors of the ongoing global surgical and anesthesia crisis.

Identifying Gaps in the Surgical Training Curriculum in Rwanda Through Evaluation of Operative Activity at a Teaching Hospital

“…Trauma accounted for most of the orthopedic and half of neurosurgical operations. 1,14,16,[19][20][21] Emergency procedures provide important training for working at district and referral hospitals. Eventually, many of these emergency procedures could be performed at the district level, allowing the referral hospitals to focus on more specialized elective care.…”

Moving from Data Collection to Application: A Systematic Literature Review of Surgical Capacity Assessments and their Applications

“…Resource limitations in LICs are also reflected in the unreliability and intermittent interruptions of essential elements, such as electricity and water supply [5,20,24]. This review also demonstrates the breadth of the surgical capacity literature.…”

Assessing cesarean section and inguinal hernia repair as proxy indicators of the total number of surgeries performed in Sierra Leone in 2012

“…Additionally, ease of access has often been a selection criteria (''convenience selection''), which can result in an underrepresentation of important data from remote facilities in rural areas. [9][10][11] Kushner et al 12 suggested that the percentage of caesarean sections compared with total operations performed (%CS) could be used as a simple, economical, and efficient proxy indicator for the level of surgical care in sub-Saharan Africa, but there were very limited data to support their hypothesis. Hughes et al 13 compiled data from Zanmi Lasante Hospital in Cange, Haiti, from 2008 to 2010, to determine whether the %CS could be used to estimate the regions surgical resources.…”

“…7,8 The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative has also developed and piloted a similar tool based on the WHO tool in Uganda, Rwanda, and Liberia. [9][10][11] Although these tools may have high degrees of reliability, they are both time and resource consuming. The WHO tool for example, is 6 pages long and has 66 questions on equipment alone.…”