Background: While ear, nose, and throat (ENT) diseases are a substantial threat to global health, comprehensive reviews of ENT services in Southern Africa remain scarce.
Objective: This scoping review provides a decade-long overview of ENT services in Southern Africa and identifies gaps in healthcare provision. From the current literature, we hope to provide evidence-based recommendations to mitigate the challenges faced by the resource-limited ENT service.
Data sources: PubMed, Web of Science, EBSCOhost, Cochrane Library, Cochrane Library, and Scopus.
Review methods: On several databases, we conducted a comprehensive literature search on both quantitative and qualitative studies on ENT services in Southern Africa, published between 1 January 2014 and 27 February 2024. The extracted data from the analyzed studies was summarized into themes.
Results: Four themes in the fourteen studies included in the final analysis described the existing ENT services in Southern Africa: 1. Workforce scarcity and knowledge inadequacies, 2. Deficiencies in ENT infrastructure, equipment, and medication, 3. Inadequate ENT disease screening, management, and rehabilitation and 4. A lack of telehealth technology.
Conclusion: The Southern African ENT health service faces many disease screening, treatment, and rehabilitation challenges, including critical shortages of workforce, equipment, and medication. These challenges, impeding patient access to ENT healthcare, could be effectively addressed by implementing deliberate policies to train a larger workforce, increase ENT funding for equipment and medication, promote telehealth, and reduce the patient cost of care.
Keywords: Ear, nose, and throat (ENT); Southern Africa; health services; resource-limited setting.
Main findings: Ear, nose and throat (ENT) healthcare in Southern Africa faces critical shortages of workforce, equipment, and medication for disease screening, treatment and rehabilitation.Added knowledge: In this review, we identify challenges in the resource-limited Southern African ENT healthcare provision and provide evidence-based recommendations to mitigate these challenges.Global health impact for policy and action: Improving ENT service delivery in the resource-limited world requires deliberate policies that improve health worker training, expand financing and resource availability, incorporate new technology, and lower patient costs of care.