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Published on: May 26, 2023
Pediatric heart surgery in Ghana: three ethical questions
1Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, 641 Huntington Avenue, 2nd Floor, Boston, MA 02115 USA. nir_eyal@hms.harvard.edu.
Abstract:
When a group of doctors and nurses from Boston, Massachusetts, provided evaluation and heart surgery to children in Ghana, they encountered three rationing dilemmas: (1) What portion of surgery slots should they reserve for the simplest, most cost-effective surgeries? (2) How much time should be reserved for especially simple, nonsurgical interventions? (3) How much time should be reserved to training local staff to perform such surgeries? This article investigates these three dilemmas.

