A skilled, sustainable health workforce is fundamental to universal health coverage. The World Health Organization has forecasted a worldwide shortage of 10 million health workers—including surgeons, obstetricians, trauma specialists, anesthetists, and others—by 2030. The global workforce gap for surgeons, obstetricians, and anesthetists is over two million, with an estimated 1.27 million more needed by 2030 to achieve minimal surgical workforce densities*.

Scaling the capacity of the health workforce requires medical leaders and others in the global health ecosystem to have ongoing conversations to identify and respond to call-to-actions to build training infrastructure to retain existing and support future workforce needs. Improving access to and maintaining the quality of education and training requires continuous learning amongst multiple stakeholders. For global surgical, obstetric, trauma, and anesthesia care, we need to address the continuum of health workers needed, from community health workers to highly specialized surgeons.

Global Alliance for Surgical, Obstetric, Trauma and Anaesthesia Care (G4 Alliance), in collaboration with ACGME Global Services, a department of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), will convene and host an interactive dialog among health professional organizations and other stakeholders to address the necessary workforce foundation to advance the capacity of, access to, and quality of surgical care systems.

Speakers will convene to address the impact of workforce development on the multiple facets of global surgery**:

• Need – Public health and policy

• Access – Cost, capacity, and culture

• Quality – Safety and effectiveness

*Daniels KM,Riesel JN, Meara JG, The scale-up of the surgical workforce, Lancet 2015 (suppl 2): S41 **Bath M, et al. BMJ Global Health 2019;4:e001808