Advancing Global Surgery: Moving Beyond Identifying Problems to Finding Solutions

Excerpt

Over the past two decades, global surgery has evolved into a well-recognized surgical discipline. This has come about for several reasons beyond the moral imperative. With the emphasis in global health shifting from communicable to non-communicable diseases, global surgery is now uniquely positioned to expand and take its rightful place within global public health. Historically, the emphasis among global surgery researchers, in order to gain a seat at the public health table, was to capture and describe the enormity of the global burden of surgical diseases as it relates to mortality. This has led to the plethora of publications on surgical epidemiology, characteristics and outcomes in differing geographic locations, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and all have a uniform theme—poor access to surgical care, and high surgical burden of diseases resulting in increased mortality and disability. Unfortunately, countries with the highest surgical burden of disease are typically those with the lowest gross domestic product, worst infrastructure, and areas in active or recent conflict with associated poor health-care systems and weak governance. …