Surgical Capacity Surveys: A Call for Papers on the Next Steps for Moving Beyond Descriptive Data

Excerpt

Growing attention is being focused on global surgical issues, with an increasing evidence base being generated in both the surgical and global health literatures. A component of this research includes assessments of the capacity to deliver surgical care in individual hospitals and across networks of hospitals in many low- and middle-income countries. These articles have addressed human resources (skills, training, staffing), physical resources (equipment, supplies), and infrastructure. The article by Lucas et al. summarizes this literature to date [1]. After an extensive search, the authors document a total of 28 studies from 17 countries that use a variety of inter-related tools to evaluate such surgical capacity. The authors restrict their search to articles on surgical capacity in general and allude to, but do not summarize, data from studies on pediatric surgery, trauma care, or other sub-components of overall surgical capacity. …