The research data collected by the African Perioperative Research Group (APORG) is available to all active members with as few restrictions as possible. The available data repositories as well as background study information and the data dictionaries can be accessed on this page.

Before requesting access, kindly first refer to our Standard Operating Procedures and current Data Use Policies in this document. This document serves to ensure secure, controlled, and compliant access to the APORG datasets; it outlines the procedures for requesting, granting, and managing access to data repositories and can be downloaded here: 

To request access to any of the below datasets, please complete this application form: 

If there are any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at admin@safesurgery.co.za

Background: There is a need to increase access to surgical treatments in African countries, but perioperative complications represent a major global health-care burden. There are few studies describing surgical outcomes in Africa.

Methods: We did a 7-day, international, prospective, observational cohort study of patients aged 18 years and older undergoing any inpatient surgery in 25 countries in Africa. We aimed to recruit as many hospitals as possible using a convenience sampling survey, and required data from at least ten hospitals per country (or half the surgical centres if there were fewer than ten hospitals) and data for at least 90% of eligible patients from each site. The primary outcome was in-hospital postoperative complications, assessed according to predefined criteria and graded as mild, moderate, or severe.

Background: Risk of mortality following surgery in patients across Africa is twice as high as the global average. Most of these deaths occur on hospital wards after the surgery itself. We aimed to assess whether enhanced postoperative surveillance of adult surgical patients at high risk of postoperative morbidity or mortality in Africa could reduce 30-day in-hospital mortality.

Methods: We did a two-arm, open-label, cluster-randomised trial of hospitals (clusters) across Africa. Hospitals were eligible if they provided surgery with an overnight postoperative admission. Hospitals were randomly assigned through minimisation in recruitment blocks (1:1) to provide patients with either a package of enhanced postoperative surveillance interventions (admitting the patient to higher care ward, increasing the frequency of post­ operative nursing observations, assigning the patient to a bed in view of the nursing station, allowing family members to stay in the ward, and placing a postoperative surveillance guide at the bedside) for those at high risk (ie, with African Surgical Outcomes Study Surgical Risk Calculator scores ≥10) and usual care for those at low risk (intervention group), or for all patients to receive usual postoperative care (control group). Health-care providers and participants were not masked, but data assessors were. The primary outcome was 30-day in-hospital mortality of patients at low and high risk, measured at the participant level.



Background: There have been insufficient data for African patients with COVID-19 who are critically ill. The African COVID-19 Critical Care Outcomes Study (ACCCOS) aimed to determine which resources, comorbidities, and critical care interventions are associated with mortality in this patient population.

Methods: The ACCCOS study was a multicentre, prospective, observational cohort study in adults (aged 18 years or older) with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 infection who were referred to intensive care or high-care units in 64 hospitals in ten African countries (ie, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, and South Africa). The primary outcome was in-hospital mortality censored at 30 days. We studied the factors (ie, human and facility resources, patient comorbidities, and critical care interventions) that were associated with mortality in these adult patients.