Surgical Anesthesia and Obstetric (SAO) care plays a significant role in public health because it is critical to the prevention of death and disability as well as the development of a resilient health care system. Unfortunately, over 5 billion people globally lack access to safe and affordable SAO care. This is largely attributed to the anesthesia workforce gap in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) which are the ones mostly challenged by this scarcity, with most of them having less than 1 anesthesia provider per 100,000 population, a far cry from the 20:100,000 anesthesia provider to population recommended ratio.

The lack of experts in commonly used obstetric regional anesthesia techniques (epidural and spinal anesthesia) in these countries not only limits optimal patient care but has also been a hindrance to fundamental anesthesiology training and practice improvement. This has resulted in limited opportunities in apprenticeship, continuing medical education and supervised guidance which are necessary to workforce reinforcement in SAO care.

The Hypnos Trainer is a low-cost multi-layered epidural simulator that is designed to mimic the human body tissue structure during epidural anesthesia administration. The simulator is a class I medical device designed as a support tool to medical practitioners for training in administration of epidural anesthesia.