About this Research Topic

Background

A recent research topic to address the public health challenge of a lack of access to surgical, obstetric, trauma, and anesthesia care with evidence-based solutions at a systems level that can practically guide LMIC governments in quality improvement of scalable surgical systems, was met with success as 14 articles detailed grassroots, national, and regional level initiatives underway. Although reflecting but a minute fraction of current global surgical initiatives, spurred by recent WHO support, the interest is palpable with over 5,500 article downloads and 23,000 views to date.

How can we further elucidate this new era of public health? How can we integrate these activities into mainstream public health language that further states its unmistakable role?

Long been the bastion of what separates ‘public health’ with ‘clinical medicine,’ the concrete walls of a healthcare institution, i.e., a hospital, cannot restrict what inherently must include the community, society, and the population in its strategies to provide equitable, safe, and quality healthcare.

Thus, the beauty and strength of global surgical care is its forcing function. Quality and safety is embedded at its core. As we take these ideas a step further, we now issue Volume 2 which in part offers an extension of the ideas of Volume 1 but exponentially challenges nascent surgical systems towards a vision for mature, complex surgical systems that have been developed in high-income countries through trial and error over the last century. Furthermore, we offer concepts such as leapfrogging and innovative financing to harness current paradigms of surgical care delivery geared towards low- and middle-income countries and therefore not only bypass intermediary levels of development using the traditional pathway but also to avoid costly pitfalls such as opioid addiction, unnecessary costs of length of stay, antimicrobial resistance, untapped manpower resource, and rampant surgical site infection rates, amongst others.

We therefore issue a second research topic addressing specific topical frameworks which describe principles and practices for the following:

• Regionalization of complex surgical services such as cardiothoracic, pediatric, neurointerventional, trauma, and oncologic surgical care

• Enhanced recovery after surgery pathways for cardiothoracic, colorectal, abdominal surgery, and other fields that are specifically geared towards LMICs with demonstrated success

• Innovative financing for healthcare solutions: what works for surgical care in LMICs?

• Innovative manpower solutions: the midlevel provider’s role in providing high quality surgical care in LMICs

• Review of current global surgical landscape, global burden of disease, solutions for the next 7 years before 2030

Original Research, Reviews and Systematic Reviews, Policy and Practice Reviews, Perspective, Community Case Study, Study Protocol, and Brief Research Report papers are welcomed.

Keywords: global surgery, essential surgery, emergency surgery, neglected surgical diseases

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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