Challenges and opportunities in providing high-quality surgical care in Canada

The provision of surgical care in Canada requires substantial improvement. In this commentary, we use the US Institute of Medicine's framework for assessing the quality of health care to explore system-wide challenges that affect surgical outcomes in Canada. Challenges include surgical wait times, long travel times for surgery, human resource constraints, equitable access to surgery, limited collection of data about the surgical pathway, a lack of transparency in the reporting of surgical outcomes and a lack of incentives for hospital systems to achieve high-quality outcomes. We propose solutions supported by available literature to help overcome some of these challenges.