Africa's Critical Care Capacity Dataset

This data shows the country-specific number and density of hospital beds, critical care beds, and anesthesia providers in Africa. Hospitals sampled by the African Surgical Outcomes Study had a median of 3 (IQR 0 – 7) critical care beds providing mechanical ventilation, with 0.9% (IQR 0 – 2) of hospital beds serving as critical care beds. This being the most current audit of hospital bed: critical care bed ratio in Africa, we adopted 0.9% as our conversion factor in estimating the total number of critical care beds per country. We calculated the total number of hospital beds per country from World Bank estimates (Supplementary Table 1). The total number of hospital beds per country was then multiplied by 0.9% to obtain the estimated number of critical care beds. This estimate was divided by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2017 country-specific population estimate to obtain critical care beds per 100,000 people. Data on the number of critical care beds from the most recent national critical care capacity audits conducted in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda were used instead of estimates for these countries.