Thyroid surgery in the UK and on board the Mercy Ships

Diseases of the thyroid are common in the developed and developing world. We retrospectively compared surgical pathologies, types of thyroidectomy, and postoperative complications between 2 case series, one from the Mercy Ships in West Africa with 87 patients, and the other from London in the United Kingdom with 120 patients. In both, the most common operation was hemithyroidectomy, and nodular hyperplasia was the most common disease. The postoperative complication rate of sero-haematoma was comparable with large international series.