Abstract
Surgical conditions account for 11 to 15% of the global burden of disease. Yet, surgical services are very scarce in the rural areas of Nigeria where approximately 60 to 80% of the population resides. Among other basic contributing factors is the shortage of surgical workforce, since Nigeria’s few surgeons practise in the urban centre of the major cities. One way to respond to this acute shortage of surgeons is the training of generalist medical doctors to undertake surgery in rural areas. The introduction of mobile surgical services in rural populations as part of the existing primary health care activities in the Local Government Areas (districts) can reduce surgical morbidity and mortality in Nigeria. This can be done by the generalist physician with training and experience in surgery using local health staff and simple surgical equipment. A number of recommendations are made.
Highlights
There is an increasing awareness of the need to increase surgical services at district hospitals and health facilities in the rural populations of sub-Saharan Africa.[1,2,3,4] A conference on increasing access to surgical services in resource-constrained settings in sub-Saharan Africa, organised by Global Health Sciences, University of California at San Francisco and others, has further highlighted this awareness[5]
The World Health Organization (WHO) Global Initiative for Emergency and Essential Surgical Care has brought to the fore the fact that surgical services have an important role to play as preventive and life saving strategies in public health[6]
One way of increasing access to surgical services in rural and resource-constrained populations is to introduce mobile surgical services (MSS). The researchers present their experience from Yala Local Government Area in the Cross River State of Nigeria regarding the use of MSS to increase access to surgical services that had not existed previously in the rural and remote communities
Summary
MOBILE SURGICAL SERVICES IN PRIMARY CARE IN A RURAL AND REMOTE SETTING: EXPERIENCE AND EVIDENCE FROM YALA, CROSS RIVER STATE, NIGERIA. The introduction of mobile surgical services in rural populations as part of the existing primary health care activities in the Local Government Areas (districts) can reduce surgical morbidity and mortality in Nigeria. This can be done by the generalist physician with training and experience in surgery using local health staff and simple surgical equipment. The researchers present their experience from Yala Local Government Area (district) in the Cross River State of Nigeria regarding the use of MSS to increase access to surgical services that had not existed previously in the rural and remote communities. This article will attempt to provide some evidence that surgery as it occurs in a large urban and complex traditional system can be comfortably extended to rural and remote communities with the available resources and manpower at the local sites and with little cost to the area’s inhabitants
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