A recent paper by Alkire et al in PLoS One explores the cost-effectiveness of surgical intervention for obstructed labor and c-section. Using the World Health Organization’s cost-effectiveness standards, the study concludes thatinvesting in Caesarean delivery can be considered “highly cost-effective.” The benefit-cost ratio implied that investment in Caesarean delivery is a viable economic proposition as [...]
Short-Term Surgical Mission: A Vehicle for Sustainable Surgical Care Delivery? In the original post, guest PLOS Medicine bloggers Gita Mody, JaBaris Swain and Maurice Musoni discuss their experience in Rwanda with Team Heart as a potentially sustainable, high-yield model.
Guest bloggers Gita Mody, JaBaris Swain and Maurice Musoni discuss sustainable surgical care delivery and their experience in Rwanda with Team Heart. Sustainable models for delivery of both Emergency and Essential surgical care and specialty surgical care are needed to eliminate global disparities in health. The most cost-effective, feasible, and replicable methods to implement the complex systems needed to provide surgery are still debated. However, to quote ophthalmologist and founder of the Himalayan Cataract Project Dr Geoffrey Tabin at the recent Extreme Affordability Conference held by the Center for Global Surgery at the University of Utah, “high quality [surgical] care is the key to sustainability.” Some would argue that traditional short-term missions, which are often caricatured as a visiting team parachuting into a foreign environment, providing clinical care for a few short days or weeks, and exiting never to be seen again, are a poor return on the investment. But, can short-term missions be structured in such a way to become components of a high-quality, sustainable plan? In our experience, they can.
Paul Farmer and the new World Bank President Jim Kim called it the “neglected stepchild” of global health. Atul Gawande admitted his surprise, “I could not understand why the world was not seeing avoidable harm in surgery as a major danger to public health.” The global health agenda is moving forward at an astonishing pace, [...]
Since I am expecting the arrival of my baby any week (day?) now, I am way beyond the point where people are afraid to ask if I am pregnant or not. I am now at the point where complete strangers will come up to me on the subway and ask if they can touch “it”. Unsurprisingly, these strangers almost always also ask if it is a boy or a girl (it is a boy) and whether it is my first one or not (it is not). Surprisingly, however, many will also ask me where I plan to deliver.
Global Surgery Conference The conference will focus on innovations for providing sustainable, affordable surgery, globally. While the need is clearly greatest in resource poor countries and in rural areas, “disruptive” innovations will ultimately reduce the cost of surgery for everybody, everywhere. As a central component of public health, surgery must be considered from the business, [...]
I had the privilege of attending a private screening of Saving Face, the winner of Sunday night’s Oscar for Best Documentary (Short Subject), followed by a Q & A with one of the directors, Daniel Junge, and one of the documentary’s protagonists, Dr. Mohammad Jawad, a British-Pakistani plastic surgeon whose work the film revolves [...]
The Bethune Round Table is a unique international conference devoted entirely to surgical issues in the developing world, held annually in Canada. CNIS and the University of Toronto Office of International Surgery are proud to host the 12th annual Bethune Round Table on International Surgery in Toronto, Ontario on May 25-27, 2012 Registration opens soon
Center For Global Surgery 2012 Lecture Series Extreme Affordability March 22-23, 2012 – Salt Lake City, UT Call for abstracts and registration for the Extreme Affordability: Innovative Solution for Surgical Care Conference. Salt Lake City, Utah, March 22-23, 2012– More than 20 speakers will speak at The Extreme Affordability Conference-the first Extreme Affordability Conference to [...]
http://www.ted.com What if you’re in surgery and the power goes out? No lights, no oxygen — and your anesthesia stops flowing. It happens constantly in hospitals throughout the world, turning routine procedures into tragedies. Erica Frenkel demos one solution: the universal anesthesia machine.
I have a confession to make: I never believed in the Safe Surgery Checklist. Working in global health here in Boston, especially when you have an interest in global surgery, you get absolutely inundated with checklist-related information—information which, honestly, sometimes seems more like propaganda than anything else. Sure, I knew the studies. I knew that, [...]
Today, a colleague, Amir Attaran, and I had a paper published in PLoS Medicine where we discuss some of the international legal constraints that hinder the availability of one of the world’s most basic and essential medicines: morphine. The paper, titled “The Inadequate Treatment of Pain: Collateral Damage from the War on Drugs” provides a [...]
