The Need for Children's Surgical Care Prioritisation in National Surgical Care Policies: A Systematic Review of National Surgical Obstetric and Anaesthetic Plans (NSOAPs) in Sub-Saharan Africa

BACKGROUND

Children born in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have an 85 % risk of requiring surgical care by the age of 15 [1,2]. Yet, children's surgery has been largely neglected by global health policies. National Surgical Obstetric and Anaesthetic Plans' (NSOAPs) reflect countries' strategic health priorities, policies, and targets related to surgical care. This study assessed the prioritisation of children's surgical care in national surgical care policies in SSA.

METHODS

This systematic review of national surgical care policies in SSA conducted in December 2022, analysed NSOAPs developed in SSA electronically for search terms "child∗", "pediatric∗", "paediatric∗" and evaluated manually for children's surgical care in relation to the NSOAP domains, health system building blocks, and surgical care. Policies were evaluated for collaboration.

RESULTS

Eight policies met the inclusion criteria. In the 797 (M = 99.63; SD = 34.83) text-containing pages analysed, there were 258 (15.5; 0-164) mentions of children's surgery search terms. Twenty-five percent (n = 2) of the NSOAPs dedicated sections to children's surgical care, 62.5 % (n = 5) mentioned children's surgery, and 12.5 % (n = 1) did not mention children's surgery. Children's surgery received citations in 25 % (n = 2) of backgrounds, 37.5 % (n = 3) of situational analyses, 87.5 % (n = 7) of strategic frameworks, 37.5 % (n = 3) of monitoring and evaluation, and 25 % (n = 2) of the costing sections. Overall, 62.5 % (n = 5) of countries included a children's surgery stakeholder.

CONCLUSION

NSOAPs are a pragmatic measure of national surgical care priorities. Our findings suggest children's surgery is not widely recognised even where commitments to improving surgical care exist. Greater prioritisation of children's surgery is needed in surgical policy development.

National Surgical Healthcare Policy Development and Implementation: Where do We Stand in Africa?

BACKGROUND

National surgical policies have been increasingly adopted by African countries over the past decade. This report is intended to provide an overview of the current state of adoption of national surgical healthcare policies in Africa, and to draw a variety of lessons from representative surgical plans in order to support transnational learning.

METHODS

Through a desk review of available African national surgical healthcare plans and written contributions from a committee comprising six African surgical policy development experts, a few key lessons from five healthcare plans were outlined and iteratively reviewed.

RESULTS

The current state of national surgical healthcare policies across Africa was visually mapped, and lessons from a few compelling examples are highlighted. These include the power of initiative from Senegal; regional leadership from Zambia; contextualization, and renewal of commitment from Ethiopia; multidisciplinary focus and creation of multiple implementation entry points from Nigeria; partnerships and involvement of multiple stakeholders from Rwanda; and the challenge of surgical policy financing from Tanzania. The availability of global expertise, the power of global partnerships, and the critical role of health ministries and Ministers of Health in planning and implementation have also been highlighted.

CONCLUSIONS

Strategic planning for surgical healthcare improvement is at various stages across the continent, with potential for countries to learn from one another. Convenings of stakeholders and Ministers of Health from countries at various stages of strategic surgical plan development, execution, and evaluation can enhance African surgical policy development through the exchange of ideas, lessons, and experiences.

A Financing Strategy to Expand Surgical Health Care

Despite an evolving need to provide surgical health care globally, few health systems, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), can sufficiently provide such care. The vast majority of the world's people-an estimated 5 billion-are unable to access safe and affordable surgical health care when they need it. This is a significant concern for global public health because the demand for these services is rising with the epidemiological and demographic transitions occurring worldwide. A principal driver of weak surgical health care services is a lack of adequate health system financing for surgical health care. This article examines the financing of surgical health care by analyzing global trends in health system financing, approaches to expand fiscal space for health, and empirical perspectives on the design, introduction, and scale-up of policies to improve surgical systems. We describe a surgical health care financing strategy, together with broader political and economic considerations, to provide policy recommendations to fund the expansion of surgical health care and an essential surgical package as part of universal health coverage in LMICs.

Global surgery, obstetric, and anaesthesia indicator definitions and reporting: An Utstein consensus report

BACKGROUND

Indicators to evaluate progress towards timely access to safe surgical, anaesthesia, and obstetric (SAO) care were proposed in 2015 by the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery. These aimed to capture access to surgery, surgical workforce, surgical volume, perioperative mortality rate, and catastrophic and impoverishing financial consequences of surgery. Despite being rapidly taken up by practitioners, data points from which to derive the indicators were not defined, limiting comparability across time or settings. We convened global experts to evaluate and explicitly define-for the first time-the indicators to improve comparability and support achievement of 2030 goals to improve access to safe affordable surgical and anaesthesia care globally.

METHODS AND FINDINGS

The Utstein process for developing and reporting guidelines through a consensus building process was followed. In-person discussions at a 2-day meeting were followed by an iterative process conducted by email and virtual group meetings until consensus was reached. The meeting was held between June 16 to 18, 2019; discussions continued until August 2020. Participants consisted of experts in surgery, anaesthesia, and obstetric care, data science, and health indicators from high-, middle-, and low-income countries. Considering each of the 6 indicators in turn, we refined overarching descriptions and agreed upon data points needed for construction of each indicator at current time (basic data points), and as each evolves over 2 to 5 (intermediate) and >5 year (full) time frames. We removed one of the original 6 indicators (one of 2 financial risk protection indicators was eliminated) and refined descriptions and defined data points required to construct the 5 remaining indicators: geospatial access, workforce, surgical volume, perioperative mortality, and catastrophic expenditure. A strength of the process was the number of people from global institutes and multilateral agencies involved in the collection and reporting of global health metrics; a limitation was the limited number of participants from low- or middle-income countries-who only made up 21% of the total attendees.

CONCLUSIONS

To track global progress towards timely access to quality SAO care, these indicators-at the basic level-should be implemented universally as soon as possible. Intermediate and full indicator sets should be achieved by all countries over time. Meanwhile, these evolutions can assist in the short term in developing national surgical plans and collecting more detailed data for research studies.

National Surgical, Obstetric, and Anesthesia Plans Supporting the Vision of Universal Health Coverage

Developing a national surgical, obstetric, and anesthesia plan is an important first step for countries to strengthen their surgical systems and improve surgical care. Barriers to successful implementation of these plans include data collection, scalability, and financing, yet surgical system strengthening efforts are gaining momentum in achieving universal access to emergency and essential surgical care.

Towards high-quality peri-operative care: a global perspective

Article 25 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the right to health and well-being for every individual. However, universal access to high-quality healthcare remains the purview of a handful of wealthy nations. This is no more apparent than in peri-operative care, where an estimated five billion individuals lack access to safe, affordable and timely surgical care. Delivery of surgery and anaesthesia in low-resource environments presents unique challenges that, when unaddressed, result in limited access to low-quality care. Current peri-operative research and clinical guidance often fail to acknowledge these system-level deficits and therefore have limited applicability in low-resource settings. In this manuscript, the authors priority-set the need for equitable access to high-quality peri-operative care and analyse the system-level contributors to excess peri-operative mortality rates, a key marker of quality of care. To provide examples of how research and investment may close the equity gap, a modified Delphi method was adopted to curate and appraise interventions which may, with subsequent research and evaluation, begin to address the barriers to high-quality peri-operative care in low- and middle-income countries.

Universal Access to Surgical Care and Sustainable Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Case for Surgical Systems Research Comment on "Global Surgery - Informing National Strategies for Scaling Up Surgery in Sub-Saharan Africa"

National level experiences, lessons learnt from the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) era coupled with the academic evidence and proposals generated by the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery (LCoGS) together with the economic arguments and recommendations from the World Bank Group’s "Essential Surgery" Disease Control Priorities (DCP3) publication, provided the impetus for political commitments to improve surgical care capacity at the primary level of the healthcare system in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as part of their drive towards universal health coverage (UHC) in the form of World Health Organization (WHO) Resolution A68.15. This global commitment from governments must be followed up with development of a Global Action Plan and a global coordination mechanism supported by regional implementation frameworks on the part of the WHO in order for the organisation to better coordinate all stakeholders and sustain the technical support needed to develop and implement national surgical health policy in the form of National Surgical Obstetric and Anaesthesia Plans (NSOAPs). As expounded by Gajewski et al, data and research output on surgical care is essential to informing policy development and programme implementation. This area still remains a challenge in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) but it is envisaged that countries will include this key component in their ongoing national surgical healthcare policy development and programme implementation. In the Zambian case study, research in the area of Global Surgery investment-the surgical workforce scale-up is used to demonstrate the important role of implementation research in the development and implementation of the Zambian NSOAP as well as the need for international collaborations to this end. Scale-up reviews informed by implementation research to evaluate progress on the commitments contained in Resolution A68.15 and Decision A70.22 are essential to sustain the momentum and to help maintain focus on the gaps in all countries. There are opportunities for non-state actors especially local sub-regional academic institutions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private sector to play a key role in surgical healthcare policy development and implementation research. Collection of and better information management of standardised surgical care indicators is essential for such research, for bi-annual WHO progress reporting and for demonstration of impact to justify and encourage further investments in surgical care.