Support Malawian Orthopaedic Trauma Patients

My name is Kiran Agarwal-Harding, and I am an orthopedic trauma surgeon at Harvard. I spend 6 months every year working in Malawi, which is a low-income country in sub-Saharan Africa with a high burden of trauma and very limited access to essential surgery. I'm trying to raise $4,800 to help deal with a severe backlog of trauma cases here.

I’m currently at Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH) in the capital city Lilongwe, Malawi. This hospital is notoriously overburdened by trauma cases - it is the only public referral hospital in the Central Region of Malawi that offers orthopedic surgery and every day new patients arrive with severe injuries that require urgent surgery.

Right now, there are over 100 patients with fractures admitted to the hospital's orthopedic department. It’s worse than I’ve ever seen in six years coming here. Patients are lying two to a bed, under the beds, on the floors, and in the hallways. Most of them are waiting for surgery, some with severe injuries that would be considered emergencies in Boston. We have only one operating room at KCH during the week and more emergencies arrive every day.

There is a plan to expand the orthopedic department into a new facility called the Lilongwe Institute of Orthopaedics and Neurosurgery (LION) which will be a huge help. It will have four operating rooms dedicated to orthopedics, but the opening has been delayed until April 28. Meanwhile, the number of trauma cases in the hospital has become overwhelming.

One strategy we used in the past was to operate on the weekends. Especially with visiting surgeons like me around and with all the ORs available, we can usually take care of a lot of patients. This was supported by a donor in the past but they’ve stopped now because LION was expected to be open already. Everyone is hopeful that LION's opening will magically clear this backlog of cases, but that still leaves all these patients already here in the hospital in a terrible state of limbo - patients with severe fractures, broken bones exposed by wounds, infections.... all just waiting potentially for months which only makes their outcomes worse and their surgeries more complicated and time-consuming. It's a horrible vicious cycle.

To run two operating rooms all day on a Saturday at Kamuzu Central Hospital, it only costs $400 to pay the staff.

There are 12 weeks left before LION opens, so we are hoping to support the team here with $400 x 12 = $4,800. Please consider donating to help these patients and so that LION will not open and be completely overwhelmed.