Surgical manpower worldwide

The essentials of manpower control are planning, production, and management. All countries need to control medical manpower in general and surgical manpower in particular, using both governmental and professional expertise and information. In many parts of the world, there is no health care whatever, in contrast to the abundance and often excess of health care personnel in western societies. This situation creates an unacceptable social imbalance. There is widespread imbalance of surgical manpower between urban and rural areas, and this imbalance is even more marked in developing countries. Manpower affects surgical training in many ways. The ideal is a well-structured program of training appropriate to the environment in which the surgeon will work. Finally, a considerable amount of surgery world-wide is still performed by unqualified surgeons, particularly in third world countries. The third world problem needs to be addressed by such health agencies as the World Health Organization.