Poor access to safe, affordable and timely surgical, obstetric and anaesthesia (SOA)
care remains a major cause of global morbidity and mortality, impacting low-income
and middle-income countries (LMICs) most severely. Globally, approximately five billion
people lack access to safe, affordable and timely SOA care. This accounts for about
a third of the global burden of disease and drives close to 81 million people into
catastrophic expenditure each year.1 In 2010, an estimated 16.9 million deaths worldwide,
a third of all deaths, were attributable to surgical conditions.1 2 Annually, about
77.2 million disability-adjusted life years in LMICs could be averted with investments
in basic, life-saving high quality SOA care.3
A major impediment to scaling surgical systems in resource-limited settings has been
the notion that the cost is too high and the planning and orchestration too complex.
SOA care systems require a functioning operating theatre along with specialised workforce,
nurses, biomedical engineers, reliable supply chain systems for consumables and medicines,
dependable blood banks, diagnostics, strong prehospital and referral systems and postoperative
care. As Farmer and Kim succinctly put it, “there is no surgical equivalent to a vaccination
campaign or a mosquito net”.4 This apparent complexity and the associated costs have
made policy-makers reticent to invest in surgical systems, despite the need for these
services to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and Universal Health Coverage
(UHC).5
Since 2015, notable progress has been made at both global and national levels. At
the global level, surgical and anaesthesia care has been explicitly acknowledged as
an essential component of UHC by all Member States of the World Health Assembly through
Resolution 68.15.6 This commitment was recently re-emphasised in a recent address
by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO, who stated that “no
country can achieve universal health coverage unless its people have access to safe,
timely and affordable surgical services”.7 At the national level, countries around
the world recognise that UHC and eight of the SDGs will not be achieved without intentional
and systematic strengthening of health systems capacity to deliver SOA services.5
Countries are addressing these surgical inequity gaps through the development of National
Surgical, Obstetric and Anaesthesia Plans (NSOAPs). These strategic plans recommended
by The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery (LCoGS) in 2015 are created to systematically
scale up SOA services within each country’s national health strategic plan to improve
health system outcomes while ensuring accountability and sustainability.
As part of the LCoGS, Verguet and colleagues estimated that scaling up surgical systems
in LMICs to meet the target of 5000 surgical procedures per 100 000 population would
cost between US$300 and 420 billion between 2012 and 2030.8 Their costs were modelled
based on both historical and aspirational rates of scale-up, given the baseline estimates
of annual surgical volume in each country and number of operating theatres.
Since 2015, several countries have created and begun implementing NSOAPs, with over
a dozen more NSOAPs in development (figure 1). Countries with fully-developed NSOAPs
include Senegal, Zambia, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Nigeria. All of these plans
have been fully costed, except Ethiopia and Senegal, which were developed before LCoGS.
A review of the cost estimates associated with these NSOAPs reveal important insights
into the scale of additional financial investments needed to strengthen surgical systems
in LMICs.
Figure 1
Map of countries at different stages of the National Surgical, Obstetric and Anaesthesia
Plan (NSOAP) process.
Table 1 summarises the investments in US dollars anticipated in the four countries
with fully costed NSOAPs. The cumulative cost of implementation ranges from US$69.7 million
in Rwanda for a population of 12.3 million people to US$16.8 billion in Nigeria for
a population of 195.9 million people. Tanzania and Zambia fall in the middle with
a cost of US$597.0 million for 56.3 million people and US$314.2 million for 17.3 million
people, respectively. On a per capita basis, this represents US$0.94 per person per
year in Rwanda, US$1.51 per person per year in Tanzania, US$3.62 per person per year
in Zambia and Nigeria estimated $17.12 per person per year. Variations in costs between
countries appear to be due to differences in NSOAP priorities set by each country.
For example, in Nigeria, healthcare financing, which includes increasing health insurance
coverage from 5% to 50% by 2023, accounts for 56% of their NSOAP cost while the finance
domain only accounts for 0.14% of Rwanda’s NSOAP cost. Significant differences in
NSOAP costs between countries could also be due to differences in costs of interventions
between countries as well as the costing methodology used.
In terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, Rwanda and Tanzania would need
to invest approximately 0.13% and 0.16% of their current GDP per capita, respectively,
to fully implement their NSOAPs. The Zambian NSOAP accounts for about 0.24% of their
GDP per capita while Nigeria’s account for about 0.87% of their GDP per capita. Countries
considering investing in SOA care should take into account the cost of scale-up and
should equally consider the economic consequences of failing to do so. As highlighted
by Alkire and colleagues, LMICs stand to lose up to US$12.3 trillion or 2% of projected
annual GDP growth in middle-income countries by 2030 if they fail to invest in SOA.9
The economic consequences of surgically-avertable mortality and morbidity, especially
as countries seek to increase human capital, cannot be overlooked, particularly with
the epidemiological and demographic shifts in LMICs. For example, in the WHO Africa
Region, non-communicable diseases and injuries account for about 47% of productivity
losses as of 2015.10 Modest investments between 0.13% and 0.87% of GDP per capita
to fund NSOAPs could prevent these large economic losses, in addition to the benefits
of decreased morbidity and mortality from surgical conditions. Improvement of SOA
care will lead to economic growth and should be considered a worthwhile investment
for LMICs.
Table 1
Cost of implementing National Surgical, Obstetric and Anaesthesia Plans in four countries
Country
World Bank Income Group
GDP per capita(World Bank, 2017) (US$)
Population(World Bank, 2018)
Current health expenditure per capita (World Bank, 2016) (US$)
Current health expenditure (% of GDP)18
Current health expenditure (% of annual government budget)18
Number of years for NSOAP implementation
Total NSOAP cost (US$)
NSOAP cost/year per capita (US$)
NSOAP cost/year per cap (% of THE/cap)
NSOAP cost/year (% of annual government budget)
NSOAP cost/year per cap (% of GDP/cap)
Zambia
Lower-middle
1509.80
17 351 822
56.54
1.90
9.60
5
314 160 747
3.62
6.49
0.96
0.24
Tanzania
Low
936.33
56 318 348
35.50
2.10
12.10
7
597 042 037
1.51
4.20
0.62
0.16
Rwanda
Low
748.39
12 301 939
48.08
1.90
9.30
6
69 735 072
0.94
1.98
0.57
0.13
Nigeria
Lower-middle
1968.56
195 874 740
79.34
0.60
6.40
5
16 768 118 788
17.12
22.18
13.22
0.87
GDP, gross domestic product; NSOAP, National Surgical, Obstetric and Anaesthesia Plan;
THE, total health expenditure.
Systematically scaling up surgical systems appears to be affordable for the countries
with NSOAPs. Fiscal space expansion for NSOAPs may in fact be possible from a variety
of sources including increasing government health spending to reach national and regional
health budget commitments such as the Abuja declaration. Currently, none of the countries
with NSOAPs have met the target of the 2001 Abuja declaration, in which African heads
of state pledged to set a target of allocating 15% of their annual budget to the health
sector.11 Increasing the annual health budget to meet this commitment will provide
significant resources to implement NSOAPs and improve SOA outcomes.
Health spending is expected to increase over the next decade as a result of GDP growth,
government spending and government health spending.12 In lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income
countries, health spending is expected to grow at an annual rate of 4.2% and 5.3%,
respectively.12 Growth in health spending will be much slower in low-income countries
at a rate of 1.8%. While it is possible that many LMICs have enough fiscal space in
their annual budgets to increase allocations to health, it is also likely that even
with increased domestic funding for health, many LMICs, particularly low-income countries,
may not be able to meet their health financing needs. Therefore, other means of fiscal
space expansion, such as development assistance for health and innovative financing
mechanisms, will still be needed.13–16
NSOAPs include a comprehensive set of interventions such as creating a specialised
workforce which requires several years of training. For example, Tanzania’s NSOAP
aims to increase the physician surgeon, obstetrician and anaesthesiologist provider
density from 0.46 per 100 000 people to 2.27 per 100 000 people by 2025.17 It should
be noted that when Verguet and colleagues modelled costs for scaling up SOA care based
on 2000–2013 data, they did not include training of surgical and anaesthesia providers
and associated personnel.8 Hence, current NSOAPs provide updated and comprehensive
cost estimates for scaling surgical systems addressing all pillars of the health system.
Scaling up surgical systems through NSOAPs is invariably an exercise in health systems
strengthening. It is worth noting that the components of an NSOAP are cross-cutting
and span all six pillars of the health system: service delivery, workforce, infrastructure
and supplies, finance, governance and information management. SOA care delivery requires
surgical and anaesthesia providers, and also requires qualified ancillary staff, a
reliable blood bank, effective referral systems, a responsive supply chain system,
functioning laboratory, radiotherapy and pathology and reliable information systems.
Expanding fiscal space for NSOAPs will likely strengthen the entire health system
to improve the diagnosis, treatment and management of non-communicable and communicable
diseases. SOA care is not a competitor for scarce resources; it is a synergistic partner
in healthcare delivery that will allow countries achieve the SDGs and UHC.
Cost estimates from the first countries to develop NSOAPs suggest that scaling up
surgical systems may not be as expensive as previously suggested.8 A moderate expansion
of fiscal space for health by governments with support from development partners could
achieve surgical system goals, strengthen the entire health system and promote economic
growth.