Surgery Saves Lives. So Why Is It Missing From Global Health?
About the session
Surgery saves lives.
It is also one of the most neglected parts of global health.
For billions of people, access to safe, affordable surgical and anaesthesia care remains out of reach. The consequences appear across almost every part of a health system.
A child born with a condition that can be treated surgically may never receive the operation they need. A woman living with an obstetric fistula can face years of preventable disability and social isolation. An injury that would be survivable with timely trauma care becomes fatal when an operating theatre, trained surgical team, or safe anaesthesia is hours away.
These are not rare specialist problems.
They are part of everyday healthcare.
Yet surgical care has often struggled to secure the political attention and sustained financing given to other global health priorities.
Part of the challenge is structural. Surgery depends on multiple pieces of a health system functioning together: trained surgeons and anaesthesia providers, nurses, operating theatres, diagnostics, blood supplies, equipment, referral systems, supply chains, and reliable infrastructure.
That complexity has sometimes reinforced an assumption that surgical care is simply too expensive or difficult to provide in lower-resource settings.
Experience from locally led surgical programs across Africa and Asia is challenging that assumption.
The question now is how to move from successful programs to health systems in which surgical care is treated as essential infrastructure.
That means integrating surgery into universal health coverage and national health planning. It means building local training pipelines rather than relying on episodic visiting missions. It means financing operating capacity as long-term health-system investment. And it means ensuring that surgery has a place in conversations about the future of global health rather than remaining a specialist issue discussed primarily among surgical practitioners.
The evidence base exists. Models for building capacity exist. Practitioners have demonstrated what is possible.
So why does surgery remain at the margins, and what would it take to bring it into the center of global health?
Discussion Group Leaders
Derek Reynolds is Senior Advisor at NeuroKids, strengthening strategies and partnerships across global health, education, technology, human rights, humanitarian action, and climate change.
Derek Johnson is CEO at NeuroKids, expanding access to pediatric neurosurgical care through locally led partnerships, innovative training, and sustainable health systems.
Mackinnon Engen is Executive Director at Watsi, expanding access to healthcare through a people-powered philanthropic platform that directly funds patient care.
Rachel Wilson is Founder & Principal at Catalysts for Change, strengthening advocacy strategies, skills, and organizational capacity to advance positive social and political change.
What to expect
A practical conversation connecting clinical experience with health financing, advocacy, philanthropy, workforce development, and universal health coverage.
Participants will examine why surgical care has struggled to become a sustained global health priority and what is beginning to change. The discussion will move from the operating theatre to the health ministry: what locally led surgical capacity actually requires, how countries can build and retain surgical workforces, which evidence matters to policymakers, and what financing structures can support the infrastructure required over decades rather than individual funding cycles.
This is not a conversation only for surgeons.
It is a conversation about what a functioning health system needs to be able to do.
Who this is for
This session is for global health funders and philanthropists, health ministry officials and policymakers, UHC advocates, surgical and anaesthesia practitioners, training organizations, health-system strengthening specialists, development finance institutions, and anyone shaping the future of global health who has not yet considered where surgical care fits within it.
What you will get out of it
A clearer understanding of the global surgical access gap and why it persists despite a substantial evidence base
Perspectives on what it takes to integrate surgical care into universal health coverage, national health plans, and essential health benefit packages
Lessons from locally led approaches to building and retaining surgical and anaesthesia capacity
A clearer picture of the long-term financing and philanthropic infrastructure required to expand surgical access
Practical questions for funders, governments, and global health institutions about what would need to change for surgery to be treated as essential health infrastructure rather than a specialist concern