Optimal Resources for Children’s Surgical Care: Executive Summary

Abstract

• Surgical care has an incontrovertible, crosscutting role in achieving child health. • Children develop different surgical diseases compared to adults, present unique anesthetic challenges, and have special perioperative needs. • The Optimal Resources for Children’s Surgery document provides a strategy for integrating surgical care for children into National Surgical, Obstetric and Anesthesia Plans. • There is an important opportunity to prevent death and reduce disability in children by scaling up surgical care in lowand middle-income countries.