Abstract
Knowing the size of the workforce in any specialty and understanding the number of years it takes to produce a specialist makes the difference between future shortages or surpluses. While studies on the cardiothoracic workforce at country level are somewhat available in the Western hemisphere not much is known, other than shortages are abundant, about the current size of the global cardiothoracic surgery workforce, particularly in low and middle income countries. While this ambitious attempt to catalogue our global workforce suffers the same limitations as its sources, it will hopefully shine a light on the need to a more robust and accurate specialty database. Beyond the relative shortcomings of this study, our results undoubtedly point at the overall global shortage of surgeons in each branch of our respective sub-specialties (Adult Cardiac, Thoracic and Congenital), but most importantly, it confirms vast inequities on the global distribution of our workforce.
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Cardarelli, M. (2022). The Global Cardiothoracic Surgery Workforce in 2020. In: Kpodonu, J. (eds) Global Cardiac Surgery Capacity Development in Low and Middle Income Countries. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83864-5_12
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