Prioritizing Surgical Care on National Health Agendas: A Qualitative Case Study of Papua New Guinea, Uganda, and Sierra Leone

Background: Little is known about the social and political factors that influence priority setting for different health services in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), yet these factors are integral to understanding how national health agendas are established. We investigated factors that facilitate or prevent surgical care from being prioritized in LMICs. Methods and Findings: We undertook country case studies in Papua New Guinea, Uganda, and Sierra Leone, using a qualitative process-tracing method. We conducted 74 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in health agenda setting and surgical care in these countries. Interviews were triangulated with published academic literature, country reports, national health plans, and policies. Data were analyzed using a conceptual framework based on four components (actor power, ideas, political contexts, issue characteristics) to assess national factors influencing priority for surgery. Conclusions: National health agenda setting is a complex social and political process. To embed surgical care within national health policy, sustained advocacy efforts, effective framing of the problem and solutions, and country-specific data are required. Political, technical, and financial support from regional and international partners is also important. Gavin Yamey and colleagues discuss the factors that affect priority setting for surgical care in LMICs and how this important treatment can be prioritised.Background: Improving human health is a key global concern. Three of the eight Millennium Development Goals agreed to by world leaders in 2000 and designed to eradicate extreme poverty globally by 2015 were directly concerned with public health improvement. And health is central to the Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015. But despite health being a global concern, individual countries are largely responsible for addressing the health needs of their populations. All countries have to weigh the health challenges that face their populations and decide which programs and services to prioritize within their national health systems. The allocation of scarce public resources to competing health and other priorities is a complex social and political process, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Little is known about why governments channel resources towards some health challenges and not others or about why some health issues become embedded within national health policy while others—including those responsible for a large burden of illness—are largely ignored by national health systems. Why Was This Study Done?: Surgical care provision is given low priority in the health systems of most LMICs. Only 6.3% of the world’s surgical procedures are undertaken in the poorest countries, where more than a third of the world’s population lives, and most premature deaths from untreated surgical conditions (diseases, illnesses, or injuries in which surgery can potentially improve the outcome) occur in LMICs. Moreover, surgical conditions kill more people every year than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. Understanding why surgical care is a low priority within national health systems in LMICs could provide insights into the social and political processes that drive health agenda setting and resource allocation. In this qualitative case study, the researchers examine the factors influencing the position of surgical care in the national health agendas of Papua New Guinea, Uganda, and Sierra Leone. Although the provision of surgical care has recently improved in Papua New Guinea, all three of these LMICs have a high burden of surgical conditions and inadequate surgical services. A qualitative study examines peoples’ opinions, explanations, and motivations for a particular issue, in order to understand the “why” and “how” of decision-making. What Did the Researchers Do and Find?: For their study, the researchers used “process tracing,” a qualitative approach that uses two or more methods to analyze change and causation. Specifically, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with surgeons, politicians, and other stakeholders to elicit information about how and why different health issues, including surgical care, are prioritized in each study country. They “triangulated” (combined) the information collected in the interviews with information about national health plans and policies and data from country reports and the academic literature. Finally, they analyzed the data using a conceptual framework with four components (actor power, ideas, political context, and issue characteristics) to identify the factors that influence surgical care prioritization. The researchers report that the priority of surgical care varied between countries but was highest in Papua New Guinea. In Papua New Guinea, surgical care was firmly embedded within the health system and received significant domestic and international resources. Notably, three dominant factors influenced whether surgery was prioritized—the level of advocacy by the local surgical community, the national political and economic environment, and the influence of donors and other international actors on national agenda setting. What Do These Findings Mean?: These findings provide insights into the process of national health agenda setting in Papua New Guinea, Uganda, and Sierra Leone and highlight the complex interplay of social and political factors underpinning this process. In particular, they identify three dominant factors that have influenced whether surgery is prioritized as a health issue in these three LMICs. Notably, the results from Papua New Guinea show that a strong surgical community can generate priority from the ground up, even when other factors are unfavorable for the prioritization of surgical care. These findings may not apply to other LMICS, and certain aspects of the study design may affect their accuracy. For example, the interviewers were surgeons or surgical trainees, which raises the possibility of interviewer bias. Overall, however, these findings suggest that sustained advocacy effort, effective framing of the problem of inadequate surgical care and of the solution to this problem, accurate country-specific data on surgical care indicators, and political, technical, and financial support from regional and international partners will all be needed to ensure that surgical care becomes a priority issue in national health agendas in LMICs. Additional Information: This list of resources contains links that can be accessed when viewing the PDF on a device or via the online version of the article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002023.