Surgery in the Developing and Developed world: A comparison between the healthcare systems of South Africa and the United States of America

It is often said that ‘medicine is a passport to the world’. The same basic needs are universal worldwide; however the disparity between systems of delivering them is immense. This article focuses on the authors personal experiences from working in the surgical field in South Africa and in the United States of America. These countries are used to demonstrate the differences between the healthcare culture and delivery in developing and developed countries. Both situations are related to our current setting in the United Kingdom with the aim of analysing the possible advantages and disadvantages of our contemporary National Health Service system.