The health care provider capacity to save critically ill children is severely lacking.
Currently, 4 pediatric critical care and 1 pediatric emergency medicine trained doctor in Kenya are serving a population of 17 million children below 14 years of age.
The 2 pediatric critical care training programs in all of Africa are at capacity and unable to meet the growing needs for the region.
African physicians training in high income countries frequently do not return to their home countries, leading to brain drain.
Despite incredible successes in decreasing global child mortality, 15,000 children in resource-limited settings continue to die each day from preventable causes.
More than 80% of inpatient deaths occur within the first 48 hours of hospital admission.
The majority of these deaths are preventable with timely and appropriate inpatient care.
Most public hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa struggle with their infrastructure.
Emergency medications and simple resuscitation equipment is frequently not available and the emergency and critical care capacity is extremely limited.
PECC-Kenya has implemented the first fellowship in pediatric emergency and critical care on the African continent to start to fill this healthcare gap.
