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Background: The South African Triage Scale (SATS) was developed to facilitate patient triage in emergency departments (EDs) and is used by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in low-resource environments. The aim was to determine if SATS data, reason for admission, and patient age can be used to develop and validate a model predicting the in-hospital risk of death in emergency surgical centers and to compare the model's discriminative power with that of the four SATS categories alone.Methods: We used data from a cohort hospitalized at the Nap Kenbe Surgical Hospital in Haiti from January 2013 to June 2015. We based our analysis on a multivariate logistic regression of the probability of death. Age cutoff, reason for admission categorized into nine groups according to MSF classifications, and SATS triage category (red, orange, yellow, and green) were used as candidate parameters for the analysis of factors associated with mortality. Stepwise backward elimination was performed for the selection of risk factors with retention of predictors with P < 0.05, and bootstrapping was used for internal validation. The likelihood ratio test was used to compare the combined and restricted models. These models were also applied to data from a cohort of patients from the Kunduz Trauma Center, Afghanistan, to validate mortality prediction in an external trauma patients population.Results: A total of 7618 consecutive hospitalized patients from the Nap Kenbe Hospital were analyzed. Variables independently associated with in-hospital mortality were age > 45 and < = 65 years (odds ratio, 2.04), age > 65 years (odds ratio, 5.15) and the red (odds ratio, 65.08), orange (odds ratio, 3.5), and non-trauma (odds ratio, 3.15) categories. The combined model had an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.8723 and an AUROC corrected for optimism of 0.8601. The AUROC of the model run on the external data-set was 0.8340. The likelihood ratio test was highly significant in favor of the combined model for both the original and external data-sets.Conclusions: SATS category, patient age, and reason for admission can be used to predict in-hospital mortality. This predictive model had good discriminative ability to identify ED patients at a high risk of death and performed better than the SATS alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Trauma is a leading cause of death and represents a major problem in developing countries where access to good quality emergency care is limited. Médecins Sans Frontières delivered a standard package of care in two trauma emergency departments (EDs) in different violence settings: Kunduz, Afghanistan, and Tabarre, Haiti. This study aims to assess whether this standard package resulted in similar performance in these very different contexts., Methods: A cross-sectional study using routine programme data, comparing patient characteristics and outcomes in two EDs over the course of 2014., Results: 31 158 patients presented to the EDs: 22 076 in Kunduz and 9082 in Tabarre. Patient characteristics, such as delay in presentation (29.6% over 24 h in Kunduz, compared to 8.4% in Tabarre), triage score, and morbidity pattern differed significantly between settings. Nevertheless, both EDs showed an excellent performance, demonstrating low proportions of mortality (0.1% for both settings) and left without being seen (1.3% for both settings), and acceptable triage performance. Physicians' maximum working capacity was exceeded in both centres, and mainly during rush hours., Conclusions: This study supports for the first time the plausibility of using the same ED package in different settings. Mapping of patient attendance is essential for planning of human resources needs., (© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.)

Purpose: While the orthopaedic management of open fractures has been well-documented in developed settings, limited evidence exists on the surgical outcomes of open fractures in terms of limb salvage in low- and middle-income countries. We therefore reviewed the Médecins Sans Frontières-Operational Centre Brussels (MSF-OCB) orthopaedic surgical activities in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and in three non-emergency projects to assess the limb salvage rates in humanitarian contexts in relation to surgical staff skills., Methods: This was a descriptive retrospective cohort study conducted in the MSF-OCB surgical programmes in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Afghanistan, and Haiti. Routine programme data on surgical procedures were aggregated and analysed through summary statistics., Results: In the emergency post-earthquake response in Haiti, 81% of open fracture cases were treated by amputation. In a non-emergency project in a conflict setting in DRC, relying on non-specialist surgeons receiving on-site supervision and training by experienced orthopaedic surgeons, amputation rates among open fractures decreased by 100 to 21% over seven years of operations. In two trauma centres in Afghanistan (national surgical staff supported from the outset by expatriate orthopaedic surgeons) and Haiti (national musculoskeletal surgeons trained in external fixation), amputation rates among long bone open fracture cases were stable at 20% and <10%, respectively., Conclusions: Introduction of and training on the proper use of external fixators reduced the amputation rate for open fractures and consequently increased the limb salvage rates in humanitarian contexts where surgical care was provided.