Laparoscopic cholecystectomy in Zimbabwe: initial report

Abstract

The laparoscopic approach has become the preferred technique of doing cholecystectomy in many parts of the world. In our initial experience with 19 patients we had no mortalities and no major complications. The average hospital stay was 2.9 days with all patients returning to normal activities seven days after discharge. Sixteen pc of cases were converted to open cholecystectomy due to difficulties in defining the anatomy. The mean operating time was 159 minutes. We believe that laparoscopic cholecystectomy can be performed safely and that it does offer advantages to many patients.