Addressing the missing piece in universal healthcare: safe surgery

SurgiBox is ultra-portable: It fits into a backpack and weighs seven kilograms.
SurgiBox is ultra-portable: It fits into a backpack and weighs seven kilograms.
Humanitarian Grand Challenge

Original article on the Humanitarian Grand Challenge website

 

Excerpt

SurgiBox focuses on the surgical microenvironment. Surgical teams seal a clear plastic bubble to the patient’s skin and operate through ports. The bubble stays clean through a filtered airflow system and protects the teams from splatters – which infect 85,000 providers yearly.

SurgiBox is now in its 6th generation of development at MIT D-Lab, and has undergone benchtop and human factors testing. It is ultra-portable, weighing 7 kilograms, allowing immediate deployment in any location. Surgical teams can now be nimble and avoid attracting attacks – an unfortunate disadvantage of the tents, trucks, and other semi-portable structures often used in emergency medicine during humanitarian crises. In addition, unlike semi-portable structures, SurgiBox does not depend on high upfront and maintenance costs and various external factors such as roads, setup time, and physical bulk. Best of all, tests show the SurgiBox sterile field is cleaner than most state-of-art-operating rooms, even in high-particulate settings.

Of course, any single innovation is only as useful as it is used and fits into the global health armamentarium as well as into existing systems. SurgiBox recently entered a co-development cycle with Doctors without Borders Switzerland (MSF). The objective is this partnership is to optimize the product to closely fits the need of the humanitarian sector. In parallel, SurgiBox is collaborating with advisor Dr. Meena Cherian, Emerita lead of the World Health Organization (WHO) Emergency & Essential Surgical Care Program and founder of the Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research (GFMER).

Original article on the Humanitarian Grand Challenge website

 

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