Lifebox Australia and New Zealand (Lifebox ANZ)

Lifebox was launched in 2011 with the simple aim of providing pulse oximeters to operating rooms that lacked this critical monitoring device. A pulse oximeter is the only piece of equipment included on the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist and yet, at Lifebox’ s launch, it was estimated that 77,000 operating rooms around the world lacked this essential piece of medical equipment. The Lifebox-Smile Train pulse oximeter has been specifically designed for use in low-resource settings – with robust construction and rechargeable batteries that stay on even when the power fails. To date Lifebox has distributed more than 34,000 pulse oximeters to anesthesia providers around the world for vital patient monitoring.

Lifebox now works across three core pillars of safer surgery – improving anesthesia safety, reducing surgical infection rates, and strengthening surgical teamwork. By working alongside local partners, Lifebox provides the training and tools needed to save lives through safer surgery and anesthesia. All of this work is rooted in the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist – a simple communication tool that has been proven to reduce complications and deaths from unsafe surgery by up to 40%.

Lifebox ANZ supported the global Lifebox COVID-19 response with the distribution of 100 pulse oximeters across Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, and elsewhere for frontline use. Pulse oximeters are a crucial tool in the detection and triage of COVID-19 patients. “Silent hypoxia”is a defining feature of the disease, with patients slowly starving of oxygen without the usual shortness of breath that would see them seek care. By the time many COVID-19 patients are having trouble breathing – they are already critically ill. The best tool to detect these patients is a pulse oximeter.