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Diagnostic imaging use has increased in Africa, which offers advantages such as quick and accurate diagnosis, but these advantages could quickly be outweighed by unfavourable impacts related to inappropriate, ineffective imaging, and subpar examinations.
This essay aims to present Africa’s position on quality and safety in imaging, provide justifications for the growing interest in quality and safety, define quality and safety from an African perspective, list drivers for quality and safety in Africa, discuss the impact of, and review Africa’s progress using the Bonn Call for Action framework while proposing a path forward for imaging quality and safety in Africa.
Despite a healthcare environment with limited human, financial, and technological resources and a rapidly expanding illness burden spectrum.
These include developing facility and national diagnostic reference levels (DRLs), increasing end-user education and training, and fostering interest in and adoption of evidence-based radiation safety recommendations and guidance tools.
Major obstacles include a lack of human resources, a low level of integration of imaging into the delivery of all health services, a lack of understanding of radiation safety, a developing radiation safety culture, and a lack of resources for facilities and chances for education and training.
The entire hierarchy of health service delivery, from priority, policy, planning, processes, and procedures, should be the focus of any solutions to these problems.
The Africa Medical Imaging market accounted for $XX Billion in 2023 and is anticipated to reach $XX Billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of XX% from 2024 to 2030.
At a ceremony at Kenyatta University, Butterfly Network, Inc., a digital health startup that is redefining healthcare through the power of portable, whole-body ultrasound and connected medicine, announced the deployment of 500 Butterfly iQ+ devices to Kenyan healthcare professionals.
The only handheld, whole-body ultrasound probe in the world will be given to 1,000 healthcare professionals (mostly midwives) in Sub-Saharan Africa as part of a million-dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that was announced earlier this year.
This deployment will improve maternal and foetal health. The great majority of people in the world do not have access to medical imaging equipment or training, which places restrictions on what can be done in terms of determining a patient’s health and risk as well as the risk to the community at large.
Darius Shahida, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Business Development Officer for Butterfly Network stated that we are altering that with Butterfly. Our efforts in Kenya are just the beginning of what is conceivable in terms of giving healthcare professionals the instruments, instruction, and self-assurance they need to revolutionise patient care using ultrasound data.
We are proud to equip midwives in Africa with the same ultrasound technology that obstetricians in high-income nations use on a daily basis. We are confident that this will significantly improve care for expectant mothers and their unborn children.
Around 830 women worldwide pass away every day from complications connected to pregnancy or childbirth, with more than half of these deaths taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organization Regional Office for Africa1.