Equitable Access to Safe Surgical and Anesthesia Care

Access to safe, timely, and affordable health care remains uneven worldwide, and gaps are especially visible in surgical and anesthesia services. While surgery and anesthesia are essential to treating injuries, obstetric emergencies, congenital conditions, cancers, and many noncommunicable diseases, the capacity to deliver high-quality care varies widely within and between countries. Barriers include workforce shortages, fragile supply chains, inadequate infrastructure (e.g., oxygen, monitoring, blood, sterilization), financing constraints, and geographic distance. Quality and safety challenges—such as preventable complications, inconsistent perioperative standards, and limited data systems—further widen inequities. These problems are not confined to low-resource settings; high-income health systems also face access bottlenecks, long waiting lists, and uneven regional provision, making this a global research priority.This Research Topic aims to advance actionable evidence on how to expand access to high-quality surgical and anesthesia care while improving outcomes, equity, and financial protection. The central problem is not only insufficient service availability, but also variable care quality and limited system resilience—issues that can be exacerbated by crises, workforce migration, and changing disease burdens. We seek contributions that identify what works, for whom, and under what conditions, across local, national, and global perspectives. Recent advances create new opportunities: stronger routine data capture, implementation science methods, more mature health-economic evaluation, and digital approaches such as tele-mentoring, decision support, and predictive analytics for perioperative risk and resource planning. Progress will require multidisciplinary collaboration linking clinical insight with health systems research, economics, ethics, policy design, and computational methods to support scalable, context-sensitive solutions.We welcome submissions addressing access and quality in surgical and anesthesia care across diverse settings, including urban–rural differences and fragile or crisis-affected systems. Topics of interest include:• Workforce: training, retention, migration, and task-sharing/task-shifting models• Care delivery models: referral pathways, perioperative team-based care, regionalization, and hub-and-spoke systems• Safety and quality improvement: standards, checklists, monitoring, infection prevention, and outcomes measurement• Financing and affordability: insurance design, catastrophic expenditure, cost-effectiveness, and value-based care• Infrastructure and supplies: oxygen systems, blood availability, essential medicines, equipment, and maintenance• Capacity and access management: waitlists, scheduling, operating room efficiency, and surge/crisis readiness• Equity and ethics: fair prioritization, gender/sex and disability inequities, and distributive justice• Digital and AI-enabled approaches: tele-mentoring, decision support, forecasting, interoperability, and governanceWe encourage Original Research, Systematic Reviews/Meta-analyses, Methods papers, Implementation/program evaluations, Health-economic analyses, and Policy/ethics analyses, as well as data/technology-focused studies with clear pathways to impact. Topic editors: Ata Murat Kaynar, Zhongheng Zhang Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81240/equitable-access-to-safe-surgical-and-anesthesia-care