Modern ventilators are increasingly compact and able to deliver a wide range of ventilator modes and sophisticated monitoring capabilities. However, the global availability of ventilators is woefully short of demand. Data on intensive care units (ICUs), a proxy measure for hospital ventilator capacity in low and middle‐income countries (LMIC's), suggest that capacity is extremely limited where it exists at all. In LMIC's, the four most common indications for mechanical ventilation (MV) in ICUs are post‐surgical care, sepsis, trauma, and maternal peripartum or neonatal complications. A significant majority of these cases can be managed with intervention involving a short course of MV. Widespread and timely access to MV can thus effectively be used to help patients in these settings and improve outcomes. This paper implores this need and highlights the requirements for a low‐cost ventilator or a respiratory support device.

It is postulated by Mann et al. that some ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom (such as Asian and Black patients) experience more difficulty in being conventionally admitted for psychiatric conditions, and therefore present later with severe symptoms necessitating compulsory admission. (1) This systematic review evaluates whether compulsory admission rates differ between ethnicities in the UK and whether patients are accessing psychiatric healthcare through conventional systems (i.e. referral from primary care).In our meta-analysis of 10 studies, ethnic minorities were more likely to be compulsorily admitted. Non-white patients were 2.38 times (95% CI: 1.55 -3.65) more likely to be compulsorily admitted than White patients. Black patients were 2.77 times (95% CI: 1.84 -4.18) more likely to be compulsorily admitted than White patients. Interestingly, there was no significant difference in compulsory admittance rate between Asian patients and White patients, with Asian patients being 0.96 times (95% CI: 0.78 -1.17) more likely to be compulsorily admitted than White patients. Although admission rates differed between races, there was no clear consensus on an increased prevalence of psychiatric disorders amongst minorities based on 32 studies in the United Kingdom.The systematic review discusses possible causes for the greater likelihood for compulsory admissions in Black patients compared to White patients, as well as the non-significant result in Asian patients compared to White patients. The possible causes encompass social stigma associated with psychiatric disorders, and cultural and language barriers to conventional psychiatric healthcare in ethnic minorities. ABSTRACTThe British Student Doctor, 2018;2(2):3-16