This past April, Syed Nabeel Zafar, MD, MPH, assistant professor in the Division of Surgical Oncology, was awarded a 3-year, $120,000 grant from the Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment to support work he is doing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Made possible through a generous gift to UW-Madison from Ira Baldwin and Ineva Reilly Baldwin, this type of award is intended to promote the Wisconsin Idea and share knowledge and experience from UW to other parts of Wisconsin, the nation, and the rest of the world.
Dr. Zafar and Dr. Deb Rusy, his project co-lead in the UW Department of Anesthesiology, are focusing on ways to improve surgical and anesthesia care in low-and-middle income countries. “The burden of death and disability from surgical care is huge, particularly in low-and-middle income countries. More than half of these complications are preventable,” said Zafar. The team aims to improve surgical outcomes in low resource settings by sharing the knowledge and expertise from the patient safety and quality improvement programs here at the UW. “In countries such as the US, we have decades and decades of experience at using outcomes data to examine and improve the quality of the surgical and anesthesia care that we provide,” Zafar explained. “We are attempting to translate some of this knowledge and expertise to implement locally contextual solutions to improve surgical care in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Zafar and Rusy’s project builds on existing partnerships between UW-Madison and two surgical centers in Africa: Hawassa University in Ethiopia and the University Teaching Hospital in Zambia. The UW team is helping the clinicians and staff in Ethiopia and Zambia develop systems of collecting data on surgical complications. They are also training and mentoring the local team on the use of this data to enhance the quality and safety of surgical and anesthesia care. The goal is to build the capacity for Hawassa University and the University Teaching Hospital to continue these programs in a sustainable manner for decades beyond the grant period. In addition, the results of the project can serve as a model for other hospitals in other low-and-middle income countries, thereby extending the program’s impact. Ultimately, the development of quality improvement programs could reduce surgery- and anesthesia-related death and disability in low resource settings across the world.