Assessing cesarean section and inguinal hernia repair as proxy indicators of the total number of surgeries performed in Sierra Leone in 2012

摘要

Background. The traditional tools to assess surgical capacity in low-income countries require significant amounts of time and resources, and have thus not been utilized systematically in this context. Proxy indicators have been suggested as a simpler tool to estimate surgical volume. The aim of this study was to assess caesarean section and inguinal hernia repair as proxy indicators of the total number of surgeries performed per capita in a given region of sub-Saharan Africa.