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Did you know that…Anesthesia-associated mortality in developing countries is estimated to be 100 to 1,000 times higher than in developed countries.
The Society for Education in Anesthesia (SEA) is in its seventeenth year of collaboration with Health Volunteers Overseas (HVO) and annually offers up to nine traveling fellowships of one-month duration to various countries for final-year residents.
Training in a medical specialty, such as anesthesiology, is exceedingly rare and difficult to obtain [in developing countries]. Too few students have the financial support and are adequately prepared to continue their education. Even those who pass these hurdles will struggle to find teachers and clinical programs where they can get specialty training. Because higher education is difficult to obtain, leading to few available physician anesthesiologists, anesthesia care relies heavily on training of clinical officers.
The long-term goal of these anesthesia-based global health programs is for these countries to become self-sustaining in terms of training their own anesthesia providers to a high standard, develop the infrastructure to expand and support greater numbers of providers, and to ultimately reduce the rate of anesthesia-associated mortality.
Interested in getting involved but need more information?
Date of Publication: Spring 2018
Date of last update: October 10, 2022
