Global Surgical Care in the UN Post‐2015 Sustainable Development Agenda

The 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) provided the global development community with an opportunity to reflect on the triumphs and challenges encountered over the last 15 years. Despite great strides in achieving maternal and child health targets, significant disparities in maternal surgical care persist [1]. Investments and scale-up of obstetric surgery and anaesthesia care are critical to close the gap in maternal mortality [2]. These and other essential surgical interventions address inequalities in health that remain outside the defined scope of the international global health agenda. Although the international community fell short of prioritizing surgical care as part of the MDGs, the post-2015 sustainable development agenda represented a rare opportunity for surgical care to be recognized as a global priority. As part of this multi-year agenda setting process, governments and members of civil society have been coming together through a number of processes to develop a core list of goals, targets, and indicators to guide development around the world (Fig. 1). Despite efforts to raise the profile of surgical care as a critical public health issue, it has remained conspicuously absent from post-2015 discussions [3]. This critical omission deserves further examination, and warrants the mobilization of stakeholders in surgical care and anaesthesia from around the world to unite in support of the neglected surgical patient.