
Our Research
Measuring our impact...
At Kids Operating Room we create capacity for children to access safe surgery in low-resource countries and we help hospitals to use that capacity.We never send doctors from high-income countries to provide care. Instead we work with the local doctors, nurses and engineers to create long-term, sustainable solutions to the lack of access to safe surgery for children.

An operation takes place on a child in a KidsOR theatre in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
We create capacity when we open a new Operating Room. These are state-of-the-art surgical facilities, each equipped with more than 3,000 items of equipment.
We have worked with surgical teams from across our global network to assess the capacity each Operating Room creates for safe surgical care, and we believe this number is 8 patients a day, 5 days a week.
Some will do more than this, some will do less. There are many factors from the complexity of the operations done to the frequency of power outages that will influence the actual number of operations carried out.
Some hospitals, but not all, will also provide routine care over the weekend, which we have not included as it is more common for this to be for emergencies only.

An operating room installed by KidsOR in Zomba, Malawi.
When it comes to using the capacity, we have two major projects. First of all, we support the training of surgeons, anaesthesia providers, nurses and biomedical engineers.
A highly skilled local workforce is key to the provision of safe care for children. It is also the only way to help countries sustain and build resilient health systems so they can ultimately move away from a need for aid.
Secondly, we provide our Solar Surgery system to take the operating rooms off a reliance on the local power grid. Solar Surgery monitors the amount of power needed by the surgical teams and provides this direct from the sun. Where that’s not enough, power stored in batteries is used to provide a seamless supply of power.

Our Solar Surgery System being installed in Kakuma General Hospital, within the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Northern Kenya.
Through our systems strengthening approach, we create capacity for care and help skilled local people to give that care in Operating Rooms that don’t suffer from the all-too-frequent power outages that affect many low- and middle-income countries. The numbers listed on this website refer to the total capacity for safe operations on children we have created.