Introduction: Sickle cell disease (SCD) in pregnancy is associated with worse maternal and neonatal outcomes. There is limited available data describing the burden and outcomes of critically ill obstetric patients affected by SCD in low-income settings.
Objectives: We aimed to define SCD burden and impact on mortality in critically-ill obstetric patients admitted to an urban referral hospital in Sierra Leone.
A better understanding of the context-specific epidemiology, outcomes, and risk factors for death of critically ill parturients in resource-poor hospitals is needed to tackle the still alarming in-hospital maternal mortality in African countries. From October 2017 to October 2018, we performed a 1-year retrospective cohort study in a referral maternity hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The primary endpoint was the association between risk factors and high-dependency unit (HDU) mortality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Sierra Leone faces among the highest maternal mortality rates worldwide. Despite this burden, the role of life-saving critical care interventions in low-resource settings remains scarcely explored. A value-based approach may be used to question whether it is sustainable and useful to start and run an obstetric intermediate critical care facility in a resource-poor referral hospital.
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