The Conundrum of Training in Global Surgery (original) (raw)

Recent updates regarding the unmet surgical need indicate that 5 billion of the world's 7 billion people lack access to safe and timely surgical care. 1 One of the critically missing pieces is trained surgical staff, including surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and biomedical engineers. The ecosystem of people and processes, as well as supplies and infrastructure, is necessary to begin to remove the gaps in care. Yet, how to fill the human resource gap has remained a conundrum. The consortium approach to surgical education has many merits and has worked well in other, nonsurgical settings where consortia of universities support the medical training programs in a low-resource country. The limitation to this approach for surgery has been the small numbers of US surgeons available to teach, combined with the constraints of time and obligations to their home departments. This shortcoming has necessarily created a situation in which discontinuity is the norm and training brigades, camps, workshops, or missions attempt to fill at least some of the training needs. 2 As described by Cook et al 2 in this issue of JAMA Surgery, the Alliance for Global Clinical Training program with the

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