How Do We Know? Comparisons of Existing Datasets for Overseas Surgical Missions

Purpose of Review Over five billion people lack access to safe surgery when they need it. Short-term surgical missions from high-resource countries are a popular strategy to try and address this deficit. Each year, thousands of providers spend billions of dollars participating in short-term surgical missions. These missions are poorly characterized in aggregate. In this exercise, we performed reviews of two databases in an attempt to identify and characterize short-term surgical missions to Uganda. The first, a traditional search of the medical literature. The second, an unorthodox search of the internet. We compare the results of each in terms of motive, trip length, operations performed, surgery type, country of origin, evidence of teaching, recurring missions, and year of mission. Recent Findings We found only one article in the academic literature that fits our criteria. We found 43 individual organizations responsible for 129 individual trips in our internet search. These are characterized in this paper. Summary The medical literature contains few traces of short-term surgical trips in Uganda. The internet contains many traces. These traces are rich in both qualitative and quantitative data. It is possible to mine, organize, and evaluate this data to better understand what is happening on the ground in Uganda and potentially the rest of the world.