World Neurosurg
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Two major challenges facing African neurosurgery include quality and quantity, in both recourses and personnel. Discrepancy is noted between the two poles, namely, the north and south of the continent and the sub-Saharan area. Although reasonably advanced in the north and south, neurosurgery remains poorly distributed and has multiple deficiencies. ⋯ Insufficient state funding and research facilities aggravate the situation and discourage the few well-trained African neurosurgeons to practice in their homeland. For those who do return home, cultural, social, economical, and political issues hinder their performance and hence the quality of neurosurgery delivered in Africa. Strategies for rectification of these handicaps are presented, including the need for high-standard local training and support from international organizations.
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Restricted access to neurosurgical care in rural sub-Saharan Africa remains an unaddressed and formidable challenge. Despite the implementation of a rigorous 5-year curriculum to train and certify indigenous neurosurgeons "in continent" as Fellows of the College of Surgeons in Neurosurgery for East, Central, and Southern Africa (FCS-ecsa-NS), provincial and rural hospitals are likely to see no change in this woeful status quo for the foreseeable future. Modifying that curriculum with a two-tiered training experience that includes fast-track certification of general surgeons to perform basic neurosurgical procedures in their own hospitals is a viable alternative to redress this problem in a timely fashion. Founded on a competence-based as opposed to a time-served assessment of clinical/surgical skills along the lines of a 2002 landmark study in the United Kingdom, such an approach (in tandem with retaining separate FCS certification for prospective faculty in the NSTP-ECSA program) deserves urgent reconsideration.
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Thoracic and lumbar spine surgical procedures are performed for a variety of pathologies. The literature consists of multiple retrospective reviews examining complication prevalence with the surgical treatment of these disorders. However, there is limited direct examination of perioperative complications through a prospective approach. Of the prospective assessments, the majority focuses on specific surgical procedures or provides a limited assessment of certain spinal implants. Prospective assessments of complication incidence in broad patient populations are limited. This article analyzes a prospectively collected database of patients who underwent a thoracic and/or lumbar spine surgery at a large tertiary care center and the effect of surgical approach (anterior or posterior) on the incidence of early complications. ⋯ There is a considerably higher complication incidence than previously reported for thoracic, thoracolumbar, and lumbar spine operations. A prospective approach and a broad definition of perioperative complications increased the recorded incidence of perioperative adverse events and complications. The case complexity of a tertiary referral center may also have escalated the increased incidence. Complications were more common in patients undergoing anterior and anterior/posterior procedures.
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Hydrocephalus, a disease frequently associated with poverty, becomes even more challenging to treat in developing regions because of lack of neurosurgical manpower, inadequately equipped public health care facilities, meager resource allocations, high rates of neonatal infection, difficulty of accessibility to hospitals able to treat hydrocephalus, and high complication rates in patients who are able to access and receive shunting procedures. Definitive treatment of hydrocephalus that avoids shunting procedures and long-term shunt dependence is a safer option. In environments such as Sub-Saharan Africa (and, indeed, in other similar resource-challenged regions), neuroendoscopic ventriculostomy (NEV), in appropriately selected patients can overcome the problems associated with shunting, including long-term shunt dependence. ⋯ Using a single portable neuroendoscopy equipment system and a versatile free-hand, single operator neuroendoscope, an easily mobile outreach model has been successfully used to perform 187 procedures in 19 hospital sites around six countries and on two continents. Neuroendoscopy is not just a priority surgical tool for East Africa; it represents a best practices philosophy of what is possible within a highly sophisticated surgical speciality like neurosurgery in developing countries. It offers an opportunity to highlight the importance of tertiary care specialties like neurosurgery in this region, to develop closer relationships between African neurosurgeons and to convince medical students, general residents, and nurses that "world-class neurosurgery" can be possible in a developing region.