Challenging the barriers to accessing surgery in low-resource settings: Lessons learned from burns

Surgery is a neglected component of primary health care in many parts of the world, with more than 2 billion people lacking access to essential surgical services.1 Yet few international initiatives are working to promote surgery as a public health good or to fund capacity building, and even fewer are developing simple, cost-effective models to extend surgical coverage outside capital cities and beyond a limited range of indications. Factors contributing to this neglect range from pragmatic challenges, such as a lack of basic materials and infrastructure and insufficient numbers of trained surgeons,2 to misconceptions3 which feed the false notion that these challenges are, practically speaking, insurmountable.