Did you know that 35 million operations take place each year without life-saving pulse oximeters?1 There is a global health crisis as a result of inadequate equipment and training to provide safe anesthesia to much of the developing world.
The ASA Committee on Global Humanitarian Outreach (GHO) is helping to address this crisis in low-income and resource-poor countries in collaboration with Lifebox and the ASA Charitable Foundation. The Lifebox Foundation www.lifebox.org is a not-for-profit entity with a vision of working for sustainable changes in perioperative practice that will raise safety and quality standards globally through key components of education, training and peer support. The founding organizations of Lifebox are the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists (WFSA), the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland (AAGBI), and the Harvard School of Public Health and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Lifebox facilitates the distribution of pulse oximeters that exceeds...
