Developing regions all over the world are medically underserved and experience tremendous gaps in the availability of surgical care, which most outside of the medical community remain unaware of. The region made up of East, Central, and Southern Africa is one such area. SurgeonWorkforce (http://www.cosecsa.org/global-surgery-map), an interactive map, aims to create awareness about this dearth by offering insight into surgical workforce distribution in the region.

SurgeonWorkforce serves as a tool to help stakeholders understand one of the most significant public health issues in the developing world – the lack of access to surgical care. The map was developed by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), the College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa (COSECSA), and the International Collaboration for Essential Surgery (ICES) with a custom-made real time database that provides comprehensive original data on the surgical workforce in the ten countries of the COSECSA region (Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe).

The SurgeonWorkforce project is led by Dr. Jaymie Ang Henry (LinkedIn). For some context, please see the article in Techonomy (link). Dr. Henry says SurgeonWorkforce strives for “the ultimate goal of increasing surgical capacity through workforce training.”

JoMI comment: As a partner at JoMI, I am quite excited to see initiatives of this sort – we share Dr. Henry’s goal and the drive to make surgical intervention accessible around the world in both resource-rich and resource-constrained environments. Our (JoMI) videos have been used for educational purposes in Haiti, and have been made available in over one hundred developing countries through a partnership with the organization Research4Life.  We hope to leverage SurgeonWorkforce to influence our editorial and distribution strategy in an effort to maximize the positive impact worldwide on patient outcomes. Thank you for creating it!