Background: A lack of anesthesia and surgical capacity leaves approximately 1.7 billion children per annum without access to surgical and anesthetic care.
Review: Over the past 50 years, the predominant strategy to address this lack of access has been to provide surgical capacity primarily from high-income countries (HICs) to low and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the form of short-term surgical missions. More recently, the international medical community has recognized the need to build sustainable surgical capacity in resource-constrained settings. This article reviews three models of surgical aid: the vertical model (short-term surgical missions); the horizontal model (system-wide capacity building); and the diagonal model, which is a hybrid of the first two. At their core, medical aid interventions exist on a spectrum ranging from providing surgical capacity to building surgical capacity.
Discussion: The skills, attitudes, and behaviors that drive success in providing medical capacity are fundamentally different from those that drive success in building medical capacity. The root cause of this difference is a shift in the moral duty of the visiting physician from a duty solely to the patient in front of them (based on the primacy of the doctor-patient relationship) to include a duty to the local physicians and the local medical system, and by extension to the next 10 000 patients in need of care.
Conclusion: Failure to address the conflicts engendered by this fundamental moral shift risks undermining capacity-building efforts in all models of medical aid.
Keywords: LMICs; anesthesia; capacity building; medical missions; pediatric.
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