Résumé en français à la fin de l'article.
INTRODUCTION
In 2015 the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery published its report “Global Surgery 2030: evidence and solutions for achieving health, welfare, and economic development,”1 helping to galvanize a global movement to increase access to safe, timely, and affordable surgical and anesthesia care with an emphasis on equity. A goal of the movement is to enable the benefits of these efforts to be reaped most by impoverished and marginalized populations. The authors laid out 5 key messages, including the great number of operations required annually (approximately 143 million), especially among the poorest third of the world’s population, which receives only 6% of the operations. The commission called on nations to track and report on 6 metrics related to surgical care. Two of these metrics—surgeon, anesthetist, and obstetric (SAO) density (the number of specialist surgical, anesthetic, and obstetric providers per 100,000 population) and surgical volume (number of operations performed in operating rooms annually per 100,000 population)—are …