Article Text
Abstract
Global surgery is an essential component of Universal Health Coverage. Surgical conditions account for almost one-third of the global burden of disease, with the majority of patients living in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). Children account for more than half of the global population; however, in many LMIC settings they have poor access to surgical care due to a lack of workforce and health system infrastructure to match the need for children’s surgery. Surgical providers from high-income countries volunteer to visit LMICs and partner with the local providers to deliver surgical care and trainings to improve outcomes. However, some of these altruistic efforts fail. We aim to share our experience on developing, implementing and sustaining a partnership in global children’s surgery in Tanzania. The use of participatory methods facilitated a successful 17-yearlong partnership, ensured a non-hierarchical environment and encouraged an understanding of the context, local needs, available resources and hospital capacity, including budget constraints, when codesigning solutions. We believe that participatory approaches are feasible and valuable in developing, implementing and sustaining global partnerships for children’s surgery in LMICs.
- child health
- paediatrics
- health policy
- surgery
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Handling editor Seye Abimbola
Twitter @GodfreySama, @ShobhanaNagraj
Contributors GSP helped in information retrieval, assembly and leading the writing team for this paper. SN performed the information review, designed the format and helped in writing to the final article. ZMB helped in providing the background of review and approved the final document. KL provided mentorship in the writing, background information of the partnership and advised on the format and model used.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement No data are available.