Module 4, Discussion 4

Capacity strengthening is utmost important as building up on resources is more efficient than building resources from start. First step is to understand the need of the population, which can be understood and measured by using standard metrics such as MMR, IMR, DR and so on. It is also important to understand specific metrics for each subspeciality for example - there are a few publications in neurosurgery and general surgery identifying potential avenues for capacity strengthening and reflecting on the barriers associated with it - here is one such example paper - doi.org/10.3171/2017.11.JNS171500 - While we continue to identify the need, the next step would be objectively present the need and come up with standard metrics for brain tumor, neurotrauma etc for example - TBI mortality rate, BT mortality rate - once we have standard that can be compared across countries that standard metric can be use a surrogate to define need for improvement. The next step then would be to identify what resources each country have and how can an external provider assist in building up on those resources to improve the metric in question.