A systematic review of global surgery partnerships and a proposed framework for sustainability

Building surgical capacity through global surgery partnerships (GSPs) between high and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is a rising global health focus. Our aim was to conduct a systematic review to characterize strategies employed by GSPs to build capacity and promote sustainability and to propose a novel reproducible model for sustainability.

We conducted a systematic review according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement. We searched PubMed, EMBASE, Medline and African Journals Online to identify all peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2016 that described GSPs between partners from the United States or Canada or both and partners from LMICs. We excluded papers that described nonsurgical GSPs, unilateral GSPs (e.g., humanitarian missions) or military initiatives. Descriptive features were analyzed, with a focus on attributes that promote sustainability. We then proposed criteria for sustainability on the basis of the themes that emerged from our review.

Our search retrieved 3580 abstracts, which were then independently reviewed by 4 authors. A total of 128 papers (3.6%) met the inclusion criteria. They described GSPs in 68 countries on 5 continents. Among the GSPs, 21.9% demonstrated community engagement and 51.6% included multidisciplinary collaboration. Surgical training or education was provided in 81.3% of GSPs. Although 64.8% of GSPs collected data, only 53.1% reported project-related outcomes. A total of 55.5% had bilateral authorship for publications, and 28.9% had multisource funding. Only 1 GSP fulfilled all 6 of our criteria for sustainability.

In this systematic review we identified 6 pillars that are indicators of sustainability: community engagement, multidisciplinary collaboration, education and training, outcomes reporting, bilateral authorship and multisource funding. We propose that future GSPs should build on a foundation of bilateral ideas and expertise exchange, that they should have defined and measurable objectives, that they should engage in continuous evaluation of program outcomes and that they should take a thoughtful and transparent approach to sustained capacity building.