Who We Are
Surgery has become a central and essential tool in the sustenance of human life. The average American has nine operations in their lifetime. More than half of hospital admissions are
surgical, and 30 million operations are performed annually in the
United States alone. Yet surgical care is surprisingly understudied.
Surgery can cure cancers, correct birth defects in the young and heart
disease in the old, reverse obesity, replace arthritic hips and knees,
transplant organs, and allow removal of everything from lymph nodes to
lung lobes through tiny, bandaid-sized incisions. Yet, we have
remarkably little information about the adequacy of surgical resources
for meeting the needs of our aging population, about the quality of
surgical care and how to improve it, about who has access to needed
operations and who does not, or about how to improve that access both
at home and abroad. In addition, as one of the most documented
interactions in medicine, surgical care remains a potentially powerful
source of information for examining fundamental questions about the
delivery of modern health care and the improvement of public health.
We have, therefore, established the BWH Center for Surgery and Public
Health as a joint program of Harvard Medical School and the Harvard
School of Public Health to remedy the knowledge deficit, to provide
direction for patients, physicians, and policymakers, and to direct
improvement in public health. There is no center like this in existence
anywhere. With the collaborative effort of experts both inside and
outside of surgery, we aim for it to become the pre-eminent institution
in the world for research and know-how for the many concerns at the
intersection of surgery, public policy, and public health. We have
identified three specific directions for the focus of our initial work:
(1) the quality of surgical care; (2) the availability of adequate
surgical manpower; and (3) the appropriate use of such resources
internationally.
We have an opportunity to establish ourselves as the leading
researchers in the world on the nature, quality, and utilization of
surgical care. By supporting a group of people examining surgical care
closely, we may also be able to illuminate far broader questions in
health care—including the causes of error in medicine, the nature of
racial disparities, directions in quality improvement, and the
appropriate use of manpower and public health resources.
Institutional Partners
Harvard School of Public Health
Harvard Medical School
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