Studying Surgical Disparities: It’s Not All Black and White

Over the past several years, there has been an explosion of publications describing disparities in virtually all aspects of our health care system. Surgery is no exception, with recent studies relating inequities in surgical care and outcomes based on race, gender, age, socioeconomics, education, and even location of where an individual lives. Progress, however, has remained slow and a major reason for this has been the lack of elucidation of the mechanisms that lead to disparities. Without understanding these, it is impossible to create effective solutions. Since most people who will be reading this chapter are surgeons, we would strongly recommend all of you to focus on identifying causes of disparities or on creating and testing innovative programs to reduce them.