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Senait Bitew is a public health professional with experience in nursing. He has worked in the healthcare industry for over 15 years and has led programs for the safest surgery nonprofit, Lifebox, for the past three years. This month, she was named Lifebox Program Manager for East Africa, where she hopes to deliver programs and strategic plans for Lifebox across the region. The reporterSamuel Getachew spoke with her about the activities and impacts of Lifebox.
A. Share with me the highlights of LifeBox.
S. Lifebox is an international nonprofit organization working to make surgery and anesthesia safer on a global scale by investing in tools, training and partnerships. Founded in 2011 by four of the world’s leading medical organizations and chaired by surgeon and writer Dr. Atul Gawande, Lifebox works through three basic pillars of safer surgery: Improves anesthesia safety, reduces rates of surgical infection and strengthens surgical teamwork. At the core of our work in 2020 has been helping partner healthcare providers respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with pulse oximeters, training materials, and technical guidance.
A. What have been some of your main activities in Ethiopia?
S. Lifebox began working in Ethiopia in 2016, partnering with the Federal Ministry of Health and its partners in Safe Surgery. The work began with the distribution of pulse oximeters, the medical device that is attached to the finger to measure oxygen saturation in the blood, along with safer anesthesia training. Pulse oximeters are not only an essential monitoring tool when patients undergo anesthesia during surgery, but it is also one of the critical tools in triage of COVID-19 patients. In total, Lifebox has distributed more than 1,700 pulse oximeters to hospitals in Ethiopia, more than a third of which has been to support our health system in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
We have also partnered with other Ethiopian initiatives to combat the virus, such as collaborating with N95decon and the Optical Society of American Foundation, the Addis Ababa Institute of Technology (AAiT), and St. Peter’s Specialty Hospital to build and test a test decontamination project. using UV-C cabinets. This pilot project is to assist the COVID-19 response in Ethiopia and other African countries to help disinfect N-95 masks by killing or inactivating microorganisms.
Another collaboration we invest in is partnering with the Ethiopia COVID-19 Response Team (ECRT), a group of 1,800 volunteers, and Tegbare’id Polytechnic College. Lifebox supports ECRT and Tegbare’id’s medical device maintenance project to repair existing medical devices at a critical time for healthcare facilities in Ethiopia.
Before the pandemic hit, Lifebox’s main area of work in Ethiopia was Clean Cut, a program that works to reduce infection rates that occur after a patient undergoes surgery by partnering with facilities to improve their infection prevention practices. Clean Cut works closely to involve members of a hospital’s surgical team: surgeons, anesthesia providers, nurses, sterilization processing technicians, as well as hospital administration.
The most exciting part is that the pilot project at Jimma University Specialized Hospital, Tikur Anbessa Tertiary Hospital, Menelik II Reference Hospital, St Peter Specialized Hospital, and Fitche General Hospitals saw infection rates from the site surgical were reduced by 35%. These impressive results were published in the British Journal of Surgery last month. With the support of the Federal Ministry of Health, we are building on this success by implementing this work in hospitals across the country and beyond.
A. How many people have you helped so far and what has been its impact on the ground?
S. Over the past nine years, Lifebox has distributed more than 25,000 trained pulse oximeters in 116 countries and trained 10,000 healthcare providers. This work has made surgery safer for more than 20 million patients. Our work now, in the reality of COVID, is turning our work to be implemented by local teams with the online support of Lifebox clinical teams. Lifebox has just appointed Dr. Tihitena Negussie Mammo, Ethiopian Associate Professor of Pediatric Surgery and Consultant Pediatric and General Surgeon as its Global Clinical Director to help Lifebox scale its impact in East Africa and around the world.
A. What is your long-term vision?
Lifebox’s vision is a world where safe surgery is no longer a luxury. Five billion people in the world lack access to safe surgery. In some parts of the world, the risk of death after surgery can be 22 times higher than in a high-income country. Lifebox will continue its work to strengthen surgical systems through tools, training and partnerships to make surgery safer, for all patients, at all times.
A. How are recipients selected?
Lifebox’s work is based on partnerships, led by local doctors who are experts in their field. We know that in some settings, resources may be scarce or a healthcare system inhibits safe surgical care. Our goal is to help healthcare providers provide the safest surgical care possible. We see this as an egalitarian association rather than a receiver model. We work where the surgical need is greatest and Lifebox, through its relationships with ministries of health and networks, can have the greatest impact. This impact is definitely being felt here in Ethiopia through jobs like Clean Cut.
