ArticleWorld journal of surgery2019
The Operative Output of District Hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal Province is Heavily Skewed Toward Obstetrical Care.
Article in World journal of surgery, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 9 citations in OpenAlex.
- Are LMICs Achieving the Lancet Commission Global Benchmark for Surgical Volumes? A Systematic Review.World journal of surgery · 2023Pooled it
- Retrospective analysis of a surgical service in a rural district hospital in the Eastern Cape.South African family practice : official journal of the South African Academy of Family Practice/Primary Care · 2026Article
- Soft Tissue Sepsis Places a Massive Burden on Regional and Tertiary Surgical Services in KZN Province South Africa.World journal of surgery · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionDistrict hospitals are key to providing universal coverage of essential surgery and for strengthening surgical care in general. This audit set out to quantify the surgical output of all the district hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal Province (KZN) over a 6-month period to see whether district hospitals were delivering the surgical care they are expected to deliver.
resultsThere were a total of 18,871 operations performed at 37 district hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal from July to December 2015. The number of operations per hospital varied widely between 2150 at a single large district hospital and 68 at a small district hospital, respectively. Surgical operations for obstetrical conditions made up by far the majority of operations at 57%, with gynecological operations making up the second highest at 15%. Only 12% of operations were for general surgical conditions. With regards to the bellwether procedures, 96.1% of these were cesarean sections, 2.1% were laparotomies and 1.8% were ORIFs. For almost all the 37 hospitals, the percentage of laparotomies and ORIFs performed was small to negligible, while the percentage of cesarean sections performed was high. The number of bellwether operations performed per 100,000 population was much higher than the number of general surgical or orthopedic operations performed, primarily because of the preponderance of cesarean sections conducted in each hospital. We observed a strong and significant positive correlation (+0.691, 95% CI +0.538 to +0.800, p < 0.001) between increasing distance to nearest regional referral hospital and rate of laparotomies and ORIF procedures performed.
conclusionsThe surgical output of district hospitals in KZN is heavily skewed toward obstetrics and gynecology. Further work is required to understand the reasons for this, but the current data imply that district hospitals are not delivering surgical and orthopedic care at district hospitals in KwaZulu-Natal.
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