Why the study?
The study was conducted to determine the availability of human resources at secondary care hospitals in Sindh province and identify gaps in the number of anaesthesiologists for safe care delivery.
There is a significant deficit of anaesthesiology personnel in district-level and tehsil-level hospitals in Sindh province, Pakistan.
May limit safe emergency surgery access in Sindh secondary hospitals; leaves open scalable training models for LMIC anaesthesia workforce.
OBJECTIVES: Our objective was to determine the current availability of human resource at secondary care hospitals in Sindh province and to identify gaps in term of appropriate number of anaesthesiologists available for delivery of safe anaesthesia care. DESIGN: A cross-sectional survey of anaesthesia workforce. SETTING: All district and taluka hospitals in the Sindh province of Pakistan. PARTICIPANTS: Administrative anaesthesia leaders in the hospitals. OUTCOME MEASURES: Standard descriptive statistics (percentages and numbers) of anaesthesia workforce in these hospitals including both full-time and part-time physician anaesthesiologists, and non-specialist physicians providing anaesthesia services as well as technician support. RESULTS: Only 54 (75%) hospitals had a full-time anaesthesia physician, and 32 of these had only one. Two hundred and one operating rooms were present in 72 (80%) hospitals with an average of three operating rooms/hospital. CONCLUSIONS: This study has identified a deficit of anaesthesiology personnel in district-level and tehsil-level hospitals of Sindh province of Pakistan.
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Khuwaja et al. (2023) studied this question.
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