5 Billion People Have No Access to Safe Surgery: How One Surgeon Is Closing the Gap

Five billion people on this planet have no access to safe surgery. It’s one of the largest health inequities in the world, and unlike treating a disease with a pill, there is no simple fix: surgery needs a working operating theatre, safe anaesthesia, trained nurses, functioning equipment, and a surgeon who can be there not just once, but every single day.

In this episode, Alberto sits down with David Kulber, MD, co-founder and president of Ohana One, a plastic and hand surgeon who set out to understand why years of short-term surgical missions to resource-scarce countries kept producing the same problems, no matter how many times he came back, and built something different in response.

• Why does David argue that closing the surgical gap has almost nothing to do with flying in more foreign surgeons, and everything to do with the infrastructure already on the ground?
• How did a pair of borrowed Google Glasses end up transforming two local surgeons’ entire careers, succeeding where years of in-person missions had not?
• Why might keeping one doctor from leaving a resource-scarce country for Europe matter more to closing the surgical gap than training a brand new one?
• A general surgeon was moments from amputating a teenage girl’s injured leg when he called David for a second opinion. What alternative procedure did David talk him through, live and step by step, that saved her leg instead?

This episode is for anyone who wants to see how one surgeon’s frustration with the limits of short-term missions grew into a network spanning more than 60 countries, more than 300 surgeons, and 13 medical specialties, and who wants to understand why 5 billion people still lack access to safe surgery, and what it will actually take to change that.

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