Although the global burden of ear, nose and throat ENT diseases is high, data relating to ENT disease epidemiology and diagnostic error in resource-limited settings remain scarce. We determined the diagnostic accuracy and appropriateness of patient referrals for ENT specialist care using descriptive statistics. Of the patients studied [age 0—87 years, mean age 25 21 years mean SD ], non-ENT clinicians misdiagnosed Compared to those aged 0—5 years, patients aged 51—87 years were 1.
Patients with ear aOR: 1. More effective, accelerated training of clinicians may improve diagnostic accuracy in low-resource settings. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. In most resource-limited settings, they are associated with poor outcomes [ 2 ]. Despite their high prevalence, ENT diseases have been disregarded in global health [ 3 ].
In Zambia and other developing countries, ENT health care is poorly funded and has inadequate infrastructure, equipment, medication, human resources and training facilities [ 4 , 5 ]. The few available ENT specialists are distributed to limited overwhelmed urban units. Although these clinicians must be competent in the basic management of ENT conditions, many countries have deemed them inadequately trained to treat ENT diseases [ 6 ].
As a result, the true incidence of diagnostic error delayed, missed or wrong diagnosis [ 7 ] and inappropriate or late ENT patient referrals for treatment among non-ENT clinicians is likely high. In well-resourced countries, the incidence of diagnostic error varies between 0. However, in low-resource settings, data relating to harmful diagnostic error remains sparse due to limited access to diagnostic resources, shortage of qualified medical professionals and poverty of electronic record-keeping systems [ 11 ].
