The World Health Organization and Neurosurgery

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the health technical arm of the United Nations (UN). Its headquarters is in Geneva, Switzerland, with 6 regional offices and 150 country offices. Among the main functions of WHO are to provide leadership on health matters at each level of the organization, convene appropriate meetings with essential partners, create standards and guidelines, offer technical support for various health priorities, build sustainable health system capacity, and monitor all critical health situations and assess health trends. This organization is governed by the World Health Assembly, which is comprised of all 194 health ministers from each of the UN Member States. To successfully deliver the work of WHO in surgical care and anesthesia requires collaboration and partnerships within WHO, WHO collaborating centers, non-state actors in official relations with WHO, academia and professional societies. Within the organization, almost all departments have active projects with the WHO Emergency and Essential Surgical Care (EESC) Programme. The foremost clinical involvement of WHO regarding neurosurgery is with traumatic brain and spine injuries. Several other aspects of neurosurgical care are included within the scope of WHO’s mandates of work. Building a service delivery platform that can deliver over several diagnoses and specialties is preferable and more sustainable than working within the silos of a single diagnosis or a single entity such as surgery. This strategy can also assist in capacity building with health systems and facilities, health workforce and training, essential medicines and medical equipment, health economics, and national health policy.