Surgical services are a crucial part of any health system, yet very little is known about the volume and availability of such services. In a study published early online in The Lancet, Thomas Weiser and colleagues have estimated that roughly 234 million major surgical procedures are undertaken every year, which equates to one operation for every 25 people.

Examining health analyses from 2004, they noted a large disparity between countries. Middle-expenditure and high-expenditure countries, accounting for 30·2% of the world’s population, provided 73·6% (172·3 million) of operations worldwide in 2004, whereas poor-expenditure countries account for 34·8% of the global population yet undertook only 3·5% (8·1 million) of all surgical procedures in 2004.

The study coincides with a new safety checklist for surgical teams to use in operating theatres, which was launched by WHO as part of their Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative in a bid to make surgery safer around the world. WHO has stated that “preliminary results [of the checklist] from a thousand patients in eight pilot sites worldwide indicate that the checklist has nearly doubled the likelihood that patients will receive proven standards of surgical care.”

Hannah Cumber

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