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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