Capacity building in cardiac surgery in emerging countries: an overview

Cardiac surgery in the developed world is advancing rapidly towards extremely expensive and time-consuming technologies such as robotic surgery, whereas, at the same time, access to life saving treatment by simple cardiac surgery is denied to many patients in the emerging world. This widening gap of access to technologies in distinct parts of the world has been eloquently described by one of the foremost US cardiac surgeons, Dr James Cox, in his presidential address to the American Association of Thoracic Surgery in San Diego in May 2001. Dr Cox demonstrated the startling figures shown in the table below and pleaded for involvement of surgeons from the developed world in capacity building in the emerging countries.