You could help make surgery safer and more accessible across the world

‘More people die from inadequate surgical care than all infectious diseases combined – we can help prevent this,’ says Professor Dion Morton.

With not enough surgeons and patchy post-operative care, two thirds of people who need surgery do not get it, and those in low- and middle-income countries who do get surgery are more likely to die after an operation. If we can roll out the right solutions, we could help save millions of lives.

Creating surgical guidelines based on one country and importing them into another country just does not work. The solutions need to practical for each country’s resources, training systems, disease vulnerabilities, funding, cultures, etc.

We proved we can do it for COVID-19; rapid research created the new guidelines which avoided operations having to be cancelled worldwide. We are working with local surgeons and hospitals around the world, empowering them to research what really works for their specific circumstances.

You could help deliver simple solutions in surgery and get more people trained

Our NIHR Global Surgery Unit is the largest research community in the world, with 20,000 surgeons in 120 countries and research hubs around the world. Our work includes:

1. Researching the simple changes that could make surgery better – such as our evidence that changing gloves before closing-up an operation reduces readmission and infection by 16%
2. Training more surgeons – for example, in Liberia right now, there are just 25 surgeons
3. Training technicians to do basic surgery, so surgeons can focus on more complex cases
4. Collating the evidence that government and policy makers need to justify changes

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