• Pediatr Crit Care Me · Jan 2011

    Out of Africa--a mother's journey.

    • Niranjan Kissoon.
    • Acute and Critical Care Medicine, British Columbia's Children's Hospital, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. nkissoon@cw.bc.ca
    • Pediatr Crit Care Me. 2011 Jan 1; 12 (1): 73-9.

    ObjectiveTo outline the journey of a mother of a critically ill child in her quest for care for her infant. This article outlines the barriers faced, disappointments, and the indignity of poverty. Questions and commentary relating to the care of the critically ill in resource-limited environments underline the issues she faces. Critical illness is very common in the developing world with most childhood deaths occurring in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. These areas are handicapped by limited access to critical care and intensive care facilities. This paper is not intended to review preventive strategies and simple inexpensive treatments that may prevent diseases and diminish critical illnesses.Data SourceExperience obtained from a sabbatical in Africa.Study SelectionA literature search with the following terms was conducted: intensive care, critical care, emergency care, children, developing countries, severe pneumonia, ventilator-associated pneumonia, nosocomial infections.Data Extraction And SynthesisAbstracts that seemed to relate to the care of critically ill or injured children from the developing world were then reviewed and relevant aspects were discussed.ConclusionCritical illness is common in areas of the world plagued with minimal resources to deal with its ravages. Parents try to do what is best for their critically ill children, but navigation of systems and lack of resources are daunting propositions. On any given day, this story or versions of it occurs in many parts of Africa and in low income countries in general. I saw similar scenes several times daily in Uganda and Kenya and, although the issues are slightly different in South Africa, failures of healthcare processes resulted in similar adverse outcomes in all areas. This is a mother's story.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…