Comparison with International Health Care Indicators In Syria:

Several indicators could be applied for evaluating health sectors and hospitals performance (1)

Only few of them, which are applicable in our survey, were chosen:

  1. Total number of Hospital Stay Days and Bed Occupancy Rates in each department
    • We need to calculate the numbers of hospital stay days per patient and bed occupancy rate, at the hospital level. Each hospital was approached to obtain the numbers. However many were missing the data of patients length of stay. Therefore, we elected to not present the data in this survey. This will be looking into it carefully in the upcoming version. However, the total beds available in acute, chronic, and rehabilitation setting were only 1702, which make the ratio at 4.2 per 10,000 population. This falls way below the WHO numbers, which range from 10 to 63 per 10,000 population in all world countries.
  2. The number of available physicians per 10,000 population
    • This number according to WHO statistics in 2008 in Syria was 5 compared to international average 13. The current number as per our survey is 2.8, which is extremely low.
  3. The number of qualified nursing staff per 10,000 population
    • The WHO report joins the number of nursing staff and midwives. The average was 28 per 10,0000, when comparing Africa and Europe hospitals. In Syria 2009 statistics the number was 14, and our survey showed a decline to 4.8 even when we add non-certified nurses. This is almost 17% of the WHO ratio.
  4. The percentage of cesarean section to overall deliveries (2)
    • The international healthcare community has considered the rate of 10% to 15% to be ideal for caesarean sections since 1985. High rates of Caesarean sections were noted, accounting for almost one third of hospital deliveries. However, this figure doesn’t reflect the real number of deliveries, as many births occur outside the hospitals and clinics, in homes by midwives.
  5. The percentage of different emergency surgeries for elective surgeries
    • Emergency surgery patients are at substantially greater risk than elective surgery patients for adverse events. Hospitals do not appear to have consistent performance across emergency surgery and elective surgery outcomes. Process of care that leads to improved outcomes to emergency surgery patients need to be identified and disseminated (3) were emergency/trauma. Our trauma and hospitals committee has studied the trauma surgeries in further depth, along with the outcomes for 193,618 trauma patients being analyzed. This will be presented in a separate paper. Our current statistics shows that almost 50% of hospitals surgeries were emergency/trauma. Our trauma and hospitals committee has studied the trauma surgeries in further depth, along with the outcomes for 193,618 trauma patients being analyzed. This will be presented in a separate paper.

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(1) - http://www.who.int/gho/publications/world_health_statistics/EN_WHS09_Full.pdf

(2) - "WHO Statement on Caesarean Section Rates" (PDF). 2015. Retrieved 6 May 2015

(3) - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21184955