High Patient Death Rates after Operations in African Hospitals
A new study shows that patients in African hospitals are two times as likely to die after doctors operate as the average death rate worldwide.
Bruce Biccard of the University of Cape Town was the lead writer of the study. He said, "It's really concerning when you see how high the mortality is, considering that the patients are generally fit and they're having a lot more minor surgeries."
Biccard and the other researchers wrote that workforce and resource shortages across Africa are likely to affect patient deaths.
The study found a severe shortage of African surgeons, obstetricians and anesthesiologists.
In addition to the high death rate, the report said, "the most alarming finding was how few people actually received surgery." Experts have estimated that 5 percent of the population needs surgery in a year. African hospitals on average performed less than one-twentieth of that number.
The report noted that patients were receiving surgery later in the course of their diseases. Nearly 60 percent of the operations were urgent or emergency treatments. In industrial countries, the rate is about 25 percent.
Most of the patients who died did so in the days after their surgery, not during the operation.
Biccard said, "We're actually failing to recognize patients who are having complications in the post-op period. So a minor complication becomes a major complication."
Biccard noted that increasing the number of doctors is an unlikely short-term solution. His group is working on a method "that will tell us before surgery which patients we think are going to get into trouble."
