Global Surgery Lab

The Global Surgery Lab is an interdisciplinary, inclusive, and diverse group that aims to improve knowledge of and access to surgical care in underserved communities through innovative, anti-colonialistic, and equitable educational platforms and research projects.

The global pandemic introduced changes in the delivery of surgical care and spurred calls for action to address the social inequalities that plague our healthcare systems, including the need for surgical education that addresses historical biases and inequities in the ways that surgical providers and the populations they serve access high-value surgical care. The Global Surgery Lab was established during the height of the pandemic to organize and direct the growing energy of students and faculty from disciplines across campus and around the world with passions for surgery and social justice. 

Our Impact

The Global Surgery Lab was first created to address the need for surgical providers in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the lack of formal surgical training programs limited the provision of surgical services to low socioeconomic status communities. To resolve this issue, a partnership between Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and UBC’s Branch for Global Surgical Care was established to create and disseminate an educational resource for non-surgeon physicians in low SES areas. The Global Surgery Lab team of physicians, professors, nurses, and students designed the Vital Surgery Training Program (VitalSurg), which contains training modules for basic surgical procedures. Through the completion of this course and an evaluation by an MSF training surgeon, these healthcare providers can be equipped with the skills they needed to provide adequate surgical care to their communities. This project led to the expansion of the Global Surgery Lab as we recruited more members, introduced new initiatives, and developed research projects to accomplish our goal of advancing the delivery of surgical services. Through the work of a diverse team of students, nurses, and physicians, our vision is to achieve universal access to quality surgical care worldwide.

The Vital Surgery Training Program (VitalSurg) was successfully implemented at the Aweil hospital in South Sudan and has since been introduced to many other communities that MSF works with. The curriculum continues to increase, with the addition of new training modules for more surgical procedures and the incorporation of instructional videos to supplement the educational content. To date, our trainees have completed:

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Sustainable Global Surgical Partnerships

Partnerships between high-resourced and low-resourced settings are often created to address the burden of unmet surgical need. Reflecting on the negative, unintended consequences of asymmetrical partnerships, global surgery community members have proposed frameworks and best practices to promote sustainable engagement between partners, though these frameworks lack consensus. This project proposes a cohesive, consensus-driven framework with accompanying evaluation metrics to guide sustainability in GSPs.

We present the first framework for building sustainable GSPs using the input of experts from all World Health Organization regions. We hope this tool will help the global surgery community to find noncolonial solutions to addressing the gap in access to quality surgical care in low-resource settings. Read the full study published in Annals of Surgery (2024).

Additionally, broader work in global health research has examined how to address inequities in international research collaborations. Through a review of existing literature and a series of workshops, Morton et al. (2021) discussed equitable authorship and the responsibilities of academic journals in evaluating research conducted across high- and low-resource settings. Based on these discussions, guidance was developed for both authors and journal editors to promote fairer research practices. One key recommendation is that studies conducted in low- or middle-income countries through collaborations with high-income institutions include structured reflexivity statements that describe how partnerships, contributions, and authorship decisions were determined.

Access the documents below:

• Sustainable Global Surgical Partnerships Checklist
• Reflexivity Statement