30,000 of Donations Place 187 Oximeters in Low Resource Hospitals
Published date : 07 January 2013
Article date : 07 January 2013
The BMJ website hosts details of their readers' response a Lifebox Foundation Christmas Appeal, the results of which put 187 pulse oximeters into operating theatres in 10 low resource countries.
Over £30, 000 was donated over just a few weeks and it was used to send oximeters and education materials to hospitals from Cambodia to Cameroon, Nepal to Nicaragua, Papua New Guinea to the Philippines. In these countries, surgery regularly takes place without any monitoring equipment beyond a manual blood pressure cuff or a finger on the pulse. In this setting therefore, a pulse oximeter is a vital component of safe surgery.
The Lifebox oximeter has an audible tone that drops as a patient’s oxygen saturation decreases. In the past year, the changing of the beep has identified internal haemorrhage during emergency caesarean sections while there was still time to act, been the eyes and ears of the surgical team in a suddenly dark operating theatre when the generator failed again, and alerted an anaesthesia provider to an oesophageal intubation; in short, oximeters have had a direct effect on the safety of surgical care.
Abayehu Haile, an anaesthesia provider at Limmu Geenet Hospital, Ethiopia is quoted as saying, “When you come to my profession, pulse oximetry is the heartbeat for my work, for safe surgery,” Haile told us. “But I couldn’t ever say—‘we have no monitor’ and refuse to work—I had no choice but to try to save life as best I could. Now thanks to you, we are using the oximeter and the World Health Organisation Surgical Safety Checklist in our hospital. I would like to thank you again and again for your impressive life saving activity. You are not only supporting patients, you are also helping professionals.”
Source: Sarah Kessler, Project Manager, BMJ
