DEVELOP RURAL TRAUMA SYSTEMS
Rural settings are characteristically beyond the reach of timely health services; disadvantaged settings like this are ubiquitous throughout the world. Facilities must exist locally in these places with the capabilities to stabilize, diagnosis, and treat any emergent patient suffering traumatic injury in order to avoid needless death and disability, and wasted time and resources for needless long-distance referral. Training in essential emergency surgical care and advanced trauma response combined with data-rich inventories can equip rural facilities to meet a critical need according to a sustainable model.
DEPLOY EFFECTIVE OPERATING ROOMS
Governments and hospital systems around the world are responding to pressure from patient populations with surgically-treatable conditions to develop new surgical capacities; however, no expert body of knowledge exists to guide a wide-scale set-up of surgical Operating Rooms. Without this knowledge ORs remain uncoordinated, under-scheduled, and fail to bring important cost-benefits to hospitals and governments that deploy them. Expert knowledge must be developed and harnessed in LMIC environments where surgical system building is becoming a public priority.
REDUCE LATE STAGE WOMEN'S CANCERS
Cancer is one of the world’s leading causes of mortality to women, and brings with it a harrowing journey that involves stigma, hopelessness, financial catastrophe, and isolation if the support systems to reach and serve patients are lacking. Cervical and Breast Cancers require a complete system to be in place to direct patients along an effective pathway-- strong social supports, trained personnel, referral sequences, diagnosis infrastructure (imaging, pathology, laboratory) treatment infrastructure (surgery, radiation, chemotherapies), palliative care and financial protection. Models of outreach and resource coordination to weaken the late presentation of cancers in LMICs are essential components of reducing cancer-related mortality globally.
EXPAND HIGH QUALITY HEALTH SYSTEMS
More patients die due to poor quality within health systems than to diseases that bring them there. As hospitals around the world give their attention to urgent quality improvements to enhance delivery of care to patients, protect their competitive position, and to curb unwanted waste and inefficiency, real resource constraints in LMICs (available funds, cost-effective data management, supportive infrastructure, trained personnel) limit the effectiveness of these efforts wholesale. Contextualized approaches for improving quality where resources are limited involves new ways of thinking and better, streamlined tools for investigating and improving hospital outcomes. Solving the quality crisis can position LMIC hospitals to do the most with what they have, and marks out a pathway towards the establishment of high quality health systems in LMICs.
PREVENT C-SECTION COMPLICATION & INFECTION
Over 20 million women across the world have children through cesarean section each year.
C-section is a major obstetrical procedure often performed as a means to save the lives of mothers and their babies. In sub-Saharan Africa, cesarean sections are the most common operative procedure performed, often accounting for up to 80% of the surgical workload. Postpartum surgical site infections (SSI), are the main cause of maternal morbidity and mortality, occurring at a rate of 3-15% worldwide. Working with hospitals to implement focused changes and with physicians on key peri-, intra- and postoperative practices SSI rates can be drastically reduced and improve C-section survival outcomes.
SEED HEALTH SYSTEMS TRANSFORMATIONS
The future healthcare landscape will be shaped by profitable business enterprises; the action of conscientious investors has the power to guide key transformations within healthcare related to affordability, quality, and access over the next 10-30 years (2050). A call for strategic investment in a global surgery portfolio of companies underscores the strategic role that private sector wealth has in shifting the healthcare marketplace, to induce demand and shape supply, so that transformative leaps bring massive numbers of the world’s population into consumer access of high quality health systems. To add 5B health consumers to market in the area of surgical systems will require investment portfolios engaging high-risk/high-reward expectations and profit-earning stewardship of surgical systems transformation.
LEAD AFFORDABILITY REVOLUTIONS
Health care affordability persists throughout the world as a problem of tremendous complexity; unaddressed, it is a source of catastrophe for many millions, and an aspect of structural violence within our societies. It will be interdisciplinary influencers across the globe-- each one addressing problems and disparities of health care access in their own regions-- who will challenge this norm with collaborations and innovations that shape the future of healthcare. For these efforts to coalesce there is need for sustained interdisciplinary back-channels, idea incubators, and innovation zones to organize surgeons, medical practitioners, policymakers, professionals, investors, technologists, and business leaders to redesign the most expensive aspects of healthcare.