Determinants of Access to Emergency Surgery at the University College Hospital, Ibadan

Introduction The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) mandates that to improve health and health equity, every global citizen has a right to improved essential and emergency surgical care and States are morally obliged to ensure this (Chawla, Rutkov, Garber, Kushner, & Stewart, 2017). These were ratified by the World Health Assembly Resolution 68.15 that made access to quality and timely Emergency and Essential Surgical Care and Anaesthesia (EESCA) a component of the Universal Health Coverage (Chawla, Rutkov, Garber, Kushner, & Stewart, 2017). It is accepted that prompt access to surgical care is cardinal for the reduction of the potentially associated morbidity and mortality inherent in surgical conditions (Scott, et al., 2016). Care following trauma has been proposed as a model for accessing indiscriminate care, as care seeking here is mostly guided by injury severity (Scott, et al., 2016); hence, we would use trauma related metrics to present a rationale for this study.

Civilian trauma mortality have been postulated to follow the so-called tri-modal death peaks, 50% of those mortalities -representing the first peak- present emergency care physicians with the dilemma of almost sudden death (occurring within seconds to minutes), thus they very rarely survive past the trauma field (Solomon, Warwick, & Nayagam, 2010). The other 50% is distributed as 30% and 20% for the second and third peaks respectively. These casualties are actually capable of presenting for care, as the second peak deaths will occur within minutes to hours and is nicknamed 'Golden hour' because a carefully executed trauma algorithm will ensure to avert a mortality in that situation; attention here is placed on carefully identifying potentially catastrophic haemorrhage of the overt or covert forms, the efficient and rapid establishment of haemostasis and treatment of circulatory shock (Solomon, Warwick, & Nayagam, 2010). The third peak deaths may represent a failure of preventing and treating infections as well as failure to co-manage other morbidities in these patients; there is a resultant two-week interval before such septic processes are significantly established to threaten survival of the post-acute phase trauma patient (World health statistics 2019: monitoring health for the SDGs, sustainable development goals. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO., 2019; Solomon, Warwick, & Nayagam, 2010).

Statement of problem Poisoning, motor vehicle crashes and firearm injuries are the leading causes of Emergency Room (ER) visits in the United States of America (USA); clearly, with the exception of poisoning, trauma-related causes necessitate most visits in the USA, in accordance with reports of trauma being the leading cause of death for persons under 45 years of age in the USA (Gani, Sakran, & Canner, 2017; Carr, et al., 2017). The annual trauma-related ER visits in the US are about 29 million visits, resulting in 2.8 million hospitalizations and 180 thousand deaths (Carr, et al., 2017) and the American region's Road Traffic Mortality Rate (RTMR) at 15.6 per 100,000 (World health statistics 2019: monitoring health for the SDGs, sustainable development goals. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO., 2019). These are despite that 88.3% of the American population have access to high level trauma centres (Carr, et al., 2017), the American region has a Universal Health Coverage (UHC) service coverage index of 78% and Density of Medical Doctors (DMD) of 23.3 per 10,000 population.

It is worthy of note that globally, five billion people lack access to safe and affordable surgery when needed, irrespective of the fact that globally 312 million surgical procedures are done annually, only about 6% of these are done in the poorest countries (Watters, Guest, Tangi, Shrime, & Meara, 2018). This is against the fact that in 2016 the low and middle income earning countries account for 93% of the 1.3 million people reported to have had road traffic accidents (RTA) and the upwards of 50 million people that were injured (World health statistics 2019: monitoring health for the SDGs, sustainable development goals. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO., 2019). Their survival may have been improved if the Healthy people 2020 benchmark on access to trauma care of 60 minutes could be met (Carr, et al., 2017); well this isn't the case as in 2016, RTMR per 100,000 population was 26.6, 27.5 and 19.2 in the African region, low and middle income earning countries unlike 8.3 in the high income earning countries and the UHC service coverage indices were 44%, 78% and 73% respectively for the African, American and European regions respectively and a similar tale for the DMD per 10,000 population at 2.8, 23.3 and 33.8 for the African, American and European regions respectively (World health statistics 2019: monitoring health for the SDGs, sustainable development goals. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO., 2019).

Aim of the study The study aims to identify the determinants of access to emergency surgeries in the University College Hospital Ibadan