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Advances

Establishing a model of surgical care

With so many global health challenges to address—such as HIV, malaria, and access to clean water—surgery often gets overlooked. Yet diseases that can be treated by surgery represent nearly 13 percent of the overall burden of disease and contribute significantly to death and disability, especially in poor countries such as Haiti.

In 2011, Joseph Rosen, a Geisel professor of surgery, led a group of Geisel and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center surgeons and clinicians to work with Haitian surgeons at l'Hopital Bon Sauveur—a charitable hospital in rural Cange run by the Haitian nongovernmental organization Zanmi Lasante and Boston-based Partners in Health. Their weeklong mission was part of an initiative to improve access to surgical care and to illustrate how partnerships with academic institutions can alleviate the surgical burden of disease in resource-poor countries.

Lessons learned from this mission are summarized in "Disseminating Surgery Effectively and Efficiently in Haiti," which appeared in the July 2013 issue of the Journal of Craniofacial Surgery.


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Geisel School of Medicine at DartmouthDartmouth-Hitchcock Medical CenterWhite River Junction VAMCNorris Cotton Cancer CenterDartmouth College