There are a limited number of ICU beds in Uganda as a whole -only one ICU bed for every one million Ugandans or 0.1 ICU beds/100,000 (Table 1) . This compares poorly with South Africa (8.9/100,000), Sri Lanka (1.6/ 100,000), and the United States of America (20/100,000) [1] . This also explains the high number of referrals to Mulago hospital from upcountry centres. This limitation is further compounded by a well-documented dearth of anaesthesiologists-a critical human resource for intensive care units [10, 11] .