It is the hope of every patient who goes in for surgery to come out alive and healthier, but that hope is slimmer for African patients, according to a new research.
The research conducted in 25 countries with its results published in the Lancet medical journal showed that patients going for operations in Africa are more than twice likely to die than the global average.
Over 18% of in-patients in Africa develop complications after surgery, while 1% of patients who plan their surgeries ahead of time die in hospital within 30 days of their operation. That is twice the global average.
This is the trend in Africa even though its population is generally younger, healthier and the surgeries they are undergoing are minor. “It is likely that many of these deaths were preventable,” the authors of the study noted.
A co-author of the latest research, Prof Bruce Biccard who is from the University of Cape Town in South Africa told the Guardian in the UK that the reason why “people do so terribly in Africa from a surgical point of view is that there are just no human resources”.
Biccard also said that the findings from the study give vivid picture of the seriousness of the challenges around surgery in low and middle income countries. “Data from Africa is almost non-existent,” he said.
“The real sad thing is that there is a lot of surgery obviously that is not happening,” he said. “That is probably a huge killer in Africa,” Biccard added.
The international team of researchers who worked on this study collected data from 11,422 adult patients at 247 hospitals spread over 25 countries.
Some of those countries data was collected include Ethiopia, Egypt, Nigeria and Zambia and the aim was to assess patient outcomes following surgical procedures.
There have been several stories across Africa detailing how patients die during operations or after such procedures due to medical negligence.
Source: Africafeeds.com
