Lifebox

234 million operations take place worldwide each year, with 31 million patients at risk when their surgery takes place without a pulse oximeter – the most important monitoring device in anaesthesia.

A pulse oximetry gap of 77,000 operating rooms in low-resource countries – compounded by low uptake of the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist – results in anaesthesia mortality up to 1000 times higher than in high-resource countries.

Lifebox is a UK-registered charity founded in April 2011 by representatives of the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists and the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain & Ireland.

We work to save lives by closing this global pulse oximetry gap and promoting use of the Checklist.